Karen Bruce is the Toronto International Film Festival’s director of Canadian Initiatives. Each day of the festival, she’ll share her top programming picks and inside tips for getting the most out of the TIFF experience.

Festival pick of the day:

I’m going plug something that we’re doing tomorrow [Friday], which is open to Canadians and other filmmakers in town. Our first panel, Friday at 10 a.m., is “How to Festival” which is targeted at all those filmmakers that are here for the first time. The idea is to share how to be prepared, how to get around, how to network and the dos and don’ts of having a great festival.

Top festival tips for filmmakers:

One is networking: Networking isn’t just about walking around the city and trying to figure it out. It’s actually meeting people that are here, finding out why they’re here and what they’re doing here; having an elevator pitch, but at the same time, not giving it all the time – there’s a time when networking is just meeting people and a time to actually use your elevator pitch.

Biggest festival mistakes?

It’s kind of an obvious one, but starting the festival and being a cowboy or a rockstar right away – going out on the first couple of nights and having too much fun, maybe a little too much networking and then ruining the rest of the festival by being hungover for the next five days!

As the fest opens, what are some of the things you’re most excited about?

We’ve got a really great lineup of films and our Short Cuts Canada program this year is phenomenal. The films are so diverse and some of the filmmakers coming out of the program, we know we’re going to see films from them coming out in the next three to five years. So I’m really excited about that.