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.

Tell us about today’s Canadian films and programming: What’s not to miss?

Today we have a panel at 2 p.m. about coproducing in a post-national world. We have two producers from In Darkness, the Canadian producer Eric Jordan and the German producer Steffen Reuter, we’ve got Peter Watson, the executive producer of A Dangerous Method, which is premiering tonight, and we’ve got Michael Weber from The Match Factory, and we’ve got one of my favourite people in the business, Sonja Heinen, she runs the Berlinale Co-Production Market. So we know that’s going to be a really popular one.

We’re going to look at what is coproduction? At what point do you get involved? How easy is it? What percentage of funds need to come from what countries to make you eligible to coproduce? Coproducing sounds like an easy term but I don’t think a lot of emerging filmmakers know exactly what it means.  How do you find out what funds are available? Canada has the most number of treaties for coproducing  than any other country in the world but that doesn’t mean they are the same for everyone: how does coproducing for Germany compare to coproducing in the UK?

On the Canadian front, what’s generating buzz at the festival today? What are you hearing while you’re out and about?

You can’t deny the buzz! We’ve got the two biggest premieres today at Roy Thomson Hall: David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method and Sarah Polley’s Take this Waltz. Directed by Canadians and starring Canadians: Seth Rogen is Canadian and we’ve got Luke Kirby in it, who I think is phenomenal. And for A Dangerous Method, we have one of our TIFF Rising Stars, Sarah Gadon, and she’s a vision. She’s beautiful in it.

Have we had a night like this before?

I have to be honest – I don’t think so! From what I can recall in the last 10 years, I don’t think we’ve had a night where two of our biggest filmmakers have had premieres back to back.

I also wanted to talk about Ingrid Veninger’s film, I’m A Good Person, I’m A Bad Person. It stars her two children, Jacob Switzer and Hallie Switzer, and she is just someone who always hits the ground running and does so much of her own promoting. She was here last year with Modra and I’m really looking forward to her premiere tonight.

It’s day three: what should emerging filmmakers be looking to accomplish as the festival hits high gear?

For a lot of people, it’s day four. Our Producers Lab Toronto winds down today and so does Talent Lab, so these guys are emerging after four days of being in intense meetings with people and they get to come out and start enjoying the festival and reaping some of the benefits of what they just learned in the last four days.

Any favourite moments from Friday?

I had two really great moments: I had dinner with TIFF Rising Stars and it was my first chance to really spend some time with the four of them. I hadn’t met all four of them yet and they are just phenomenal. They are talented, they are beautiful. It’s our first year doing the program, so it’s a learning  curve for all of us and they’ve had a fantastic day and they are going to be walking the red carpet for our session tomrrow night. And then I was at the Q&A for our Short Cuts Canada Programme 1 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox; it was a full house and it was fantastic. We had the star of Patch Town, he flew in from Glasgow yesterday and he’s flying out today to Dublin today. We had Hugh and Enrico from Flashpoint, they directed a short, Issues, and we had a really good turnout and it was a great Q&A.