Right on schedule, business at the Toronto International Film Festival picked up around the halfway mark – with Lionsgate Films acquiring the U.S. rights for Sarah Polley’s critically acclaimed drama Away from Her, and its Canadian subsidiary Maple Pictures landing the Canuck rights to the highly contentious Death of a President. Meanwhile, TVA Films scooped the CGI Ugly Duckling and Me, a copro from Ireland, Denmark, France and Germany.

These deals closed midway through the 10-day fete as Playback went to press, putting down early talk that the market side of the 31st annual TIFF was looking weaker than those of recent years.

‘[Death of a President] was the hot potato going in and everybody knew it,’ says Maple co-president Brad Pelman, noting that Maple will release its pickup – which recounts the fictionalized assassination of George W. Bush – in lockstep with Newmarket Films in the U.S., most likely in the fall or spring.

‘I think it’s going to be an average acquisition market,’ Pelman predicted, without bidding wars such as last year’s mad scramble for Thank You for Smoking, which earned a soft US$24 million this year for Fox Searchlight after the distrib paid a reported US$7-million for it.

‘Everybody learned from that experience last year… there’s not going to be a breakout hit. Even Death of a President is going to take a lot of work.’

DOAP, as the film was slyly billed at first, was certainly the most controversial film of this year’s TIFF, which also screened the graphic sexual hijinks of ThinkFilm’s Shortbus, starring CBC Radio host Sook-Yin Lee.

And yet, by TIFF’s halftime, there was little overall movement among Canadian titles. Many, such as Fido, arrived with Canuck and U.S. distribution deals already in place, though the zombie comedy was courting other territories through Lionsgate and has reportedly sold to more than 70% of the world’s markets.

(For evidence of the festival’s toll on participants, look no further than Gordon Pinsent’s collapse at the Away from Her party on Sept. 11. The veteran actor spent the night in hospital, reportedly recovering from dehydration.)

Buyers and sellers alike note that TIFF is becoming less of a market, and more of a jumping-off point for theatrical releases, the award season and more deal-driven events such as the American Film Market.

It’s more like a big, comfortable screening room, says Wouter Barendrecht of Fortissimo Films, the foreign sales agent for both the American-made Shortbus and Snow Cake, the drama from Toronto art house Rhombus Media and Revolution Films in the U.K.

Shortbus, he notes, ‘totally sold out in Cannes’ and is using TIFF to relaunch for its Oct. 6 release.

Norman Cohn – co-director of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen – also used his film’s plum spot as the opening night gala as a springboard to its Sept. 29 Canuck launch.

‘The first release is coming up in a few weeks, so if I was a buyer, why not just wait a month and see how it does in Canada?’ he says.

Rasmussen – the decidedly uncommercial recount of a Danish explorer’s dealings with the Inuit in the 1920s – bowed to some 2,000 fest-goers at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, preceded by a performance of Inuit throat singing by Tanya Tagaq.

The fest also saw the presentation of the CFTPA’s first Producer’s Award to Luc Déry of micro_scope for his work on Congorama, another of TIFF’s hotter Canuck tickets. The annual prize recognizes entrepreneurial efforts by a producer and comes with a $10,000 cheque and a $1,000 supply of film stock.

Déry pulled together 17 investors in total to back the Canada/Belgium/France copro – from Telefilm Canada and SODEC ‘on down the line to a chimney company in Belgium that invested through a tax-shelter program,’ he says. ‘It makes your head spin.

‘The thing I’m most proud of is doing the copro without compromising the creative,’ he adds, noting that the script – about a Belgian man’s search for his Quebecois biological parents – more or less dictated how it needed to be shot.

‘You couldn’t exchange Belgium for France or Belgium for Germany,’ he says.

Déry was optimistic that Congorama’s positive buzz from its turn at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes would pay off in Toronto, though he adds, ‘It’s not the type of film people are going to jump over, except in French territories.’

Other deals in the early days of the fest included the teen horror All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Vince Vaughan’s Wild West Comedy Show, both of which went to The Weinstein Company. MGM also grabbed Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, while ThinkFilm took the Morgan Freeman vehicle 10 Items or Less.

Meanwhile, filmmakers Anthony Del Col and Jagdeep Mavi won the Telefilm Canada Pitch This! competition for their comedy Outsourced, about a computer programmer who arranges for his own job to be relocated to India. The pair went home with $10,000 to further develop the would-be feature.

www.bell.ca/filmfest