For many who attend the Toronto International Film Festival, there is a single event or film that seems to crystallize the experience for them or best illustrate where the film biz is at.

For me, the defining moment – for a number of reasons – was the gala screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett heading an international cast. After seeing the Lionsgate doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon, I headed for Babel’s North American premiere and came upon a modern version of Beatlemania right outside Roy Thomson Hall.

It was precisely the kind of scene that TIFF detractors condemn, where the spectacle of having a big Hollywood star on hand threatens to overshadow the film itself. The preceding show ran late, so all the Babel ticket-holders were waiting outside, filling up the sidewalk and most of Simcoe Street, across from perhaps the largest assembly of celebrity gawkers the festival has ever seen. I don’t think this many people have converged on a Toronto street since the Jays last won the World Series.

When Pitt emerged from his limo, there was a collective shriek from the crowd, and the flashes were seizure-inducing.

The film itself provided a stark contrast to that Hollywood moment. The story of an estranged American couple whose reconciliatory trip to Morocco is interrupted by a violent incident was not exactly conducive to a Saturday night party mood – and certainly not the kind of movie you would want to see and then come home to a babysitter afterward. But edgy programming choices are what the festival should be about, and, after all, isn’t ‘grim’ an adjective that is often – fairly or unfairly – leveled against Canadian movies?

Produced by U.S. players Anonymous Content and Zeta Films (run by actress Catherine Zeta Jones), Dubai’s Central Films and Morocco’s Dune Films, and filmed in Morocco, Mexico and Japan, the film (with an estimated budget of US$25 million) also provides a perfect model for how Canadian cinema can make its mark on the world stage.

Babel connects storylines set in the Middle East, Mexico and Japan, and it shot in each of these locales with indigenous talent, thereby generating distribution and broadcast interest in disparate corners of the world. Then, add an international star of Pitt’s caliber, and all of a sudden you turn what would have been relegated to the festival circuit and the art house into a movie with genuine commercial clout.

The risk with such international mélanges, however, is that their globe-trotting settings can come off as more a part of their financing scheme than a natural function of the stories they tell. In this case, although Babel is brilliantly crafted, its episodic storylines didn’t completely cohere. A Japanese segment involving a deaf-mute girl is connected to the main plot very tenuously, and how it thematically fits in is more than a little mystifying.

But sometimes a film can tie together its global backdrops in a more artistically satifsfying way. Take, for example, the Academy Award-winner The Red Violin, which involves producers from Canada, Italy and the U.K., and which shot in Toronto, Europe and Asia. The distant locales never seem like a stretch in this story of how a violin gets passed down throughout the centuries.

The $10 million film was spearheaded by Toronto’s Rhombus Media, and it’s safe to say that Rhombus’ Niv Fichman is the Canadian master of putting together these kinds of films. Recently, he produced Silk, a $26-million drama by Red Violin director François Girard with Italian, Japanese and U.S. partners. For this story of a 19th century smuggler venturing from Europe to Japan, Fichman signed up star Keira Knightley, whom you may have heard of. She appears in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which recently topped US$1 billion at the worldwide box office.

And it doesn’t stop there for Fichman, with a report in The Globe and Mail that he has landed Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (Oscar-nominated for City of God) to helm Don McKellar’s adaptation of José Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel Blindness. The film is copro’d with the U.K., Japan and Brazil. McKellar, a fine actor, will also star, but the film will also need to bring on board some more internationally recognized performers.

And if Fichman is able to do that, Blindness will join Babel and Silk on screens here, there and everywhere.