‘We had the world’s most public test-screening,’ says Niv Fichman. The producer of Blindness is laughing as he recounts the moment when the lights went up after the film’s world premiere in competition at Cannes. ‘The crowd was cheering, but [DOP] César [Charlone] was saying to [director] Fernando [Meirelles] and me, ‘I guess we have some work to do.”

Changing a film after its world premiere is audacious. But Blindness was projected digitally at Cannes. Thus, because Fichman and company had not gone to the expense of a negative cut and a print, making changes ahead of the film’s special presentation screening at the Toronto International Film Festival was an easier choice.

Whether any filmmakers who presented features at TIFF will take the opportunity to make post-festival adjustments, 57 of them are in a better position to do so. That’s the number of features that screened this year at TIFF via digital projection, the most ever.

But changing a film is also risky. Most of the world’s influential critics are at Cannes, and their opinions are established there – mostly in print. Blindness was noticeably altered, but those same critics may have passed on sitting through the new version at Toronto, especially with so many other titles demanding their limited TIFF time.

Fichman says digital presentation was not the original intention. He says the window between Cannes’ selection announcements and the festival screening was narrower than in past years, forcing the production to rush. And while Fichman wants to make it clear that he and his team were happy with Blindness, their own reaction to the film – and to the feedback from buyers and critics at Cannes – led them to re-evaluate the film’s original iteration.

Having a digital print, says Fichman, ‘allowed us to make the decision on our own. We could maintain our independence.’

He says the key financial players – Canadian distributor Alliance Films, Miramax, which is distributing the film in the U.S., and Focus Features, which is handling international sales – were all consulted.

But there’s a world of difference between asking your distributors and sales agents if they have any suggestions for changes and asking them to pay for those changes.

Andrei Gravelle has watched digital projection from its infancy. He has been with the Toronto International Film Festival Group for 16 years, four of them as its technical manager. TIFF’s first HD screening was in 2000 with Bernard Rose’s ivans xtc, a thinly veiled portrait of former Hollywood superagent Jay Moloney, who took his own life in 1996 following allegations of cocaine addiction.

Over the next few years, the growth was exponential. Says Gravelle: ‘We had five or six, and then double that the next year. It plateaued around 2005. And now we are seeing growth again. This year is another leap.’

Gravelle also handles technical issues for TIFFG’s children’s film festival Sprockets, which screened DreamWorks Animation’s Over the Hedge on D-cinema as a work-in-progress in 2006.

TIFF ’08 screened 90 digital titles. Seven of the 57 features are via D-cinema, with the digital print stored on a hard drive. (The total would be eight if you count Steven Soderbegh’s four-hour epic Che as two pictures.)

One of them is Jean-François Richet’s L’instinct de mort (Public Enemy Number One), the France/Canada coproduction which screened as a work-in-progress in a gala slot at TIFF. Asked if the film’s Toronto presentation offered the promise of a test screening for his film, producer André Rouleau of Montreal’s Caramel Films gave an emphatic no.

‘For us, TIFF [was] a platform to present our film to the world and get as much recognition from the press as possible. The fact that sometimes a film may not be totally finished refers to technical elements only.’

Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel, producers of the Midnight Madness horror title Deadgirl, have a foot in both camps. ‘It’s not a ‘test screening’ per se,’ says Sarmiento. ‘But we do know there are a few things we still want to do to the film before we are absolutely final. D-cinema allows us to comfortably proceed, knowing we can probably tweak some things.’

Gravelle says this is the first year the festival could be said to have a digital infrastructure, with 16 screens available for digital presentation. Kitchener, ON-based Christie Digital provided the projectors, while Dolby provided servers and the technicians to run them. As an indication of the growth of digital projection, of the cinemas provided to TIFF by the new AMC Dundas Square facility, four of those were retrofitted with analog projectors for TIFF’s celluloid offerings.

Says Gravelle: ‘We have reached a point with HD presentation where filmmakers prefer to present a work-in-progress digitally. Very few productions are doing dailies any more or even a work print. So it just makes sense to spit it out digitally. Film was convenient because that’s what cinemas are equipped to present, but we are getting to the point where a digital print is equally convenient.’

Not that digital projection is without setbacks. A TIFF press screening on Sept. 4 of Ghost Town, a DreamWorks/Spyglass picture presented in D-cinema, experienced technical difficulties, with one section of the film pixelating for five minutes.

As for Blindness, Take 2?

‘The version at Toronto is a beautiful print,’ says Fichman. ‘We are fully committed. No matter what happens now, I’m moving on.’