The figures speak for themselves: The film bazaar at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival has ended with a whimper.

By late Wednesday, the onset of Ramadan and Rosh Hashana caused a Flight from Egypt exodus of U.S. and European buyers, leaving few big players at the table.

ThinkFilm, which bought Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me for $2 million early in the festival, closed the event by purchasing all U.S. rights for Stuart Townsend’s Battle in Seattle for around as much.

Elsewhere, Warner Independent Pictures paid $1.25 million for Alan Ball’s controversial child sex drama Nothing Is Private. And The Weinstein Company picked up the North American rights to Grant Gee’s documentary about Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis for low six-figures, after it grabbed the North American and Mexican rights to George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead for $2.5 million.

But unlike Romero’s zombies, the seven-figure film sales just didn’t keep on coming this week in Toronto.

Instead, prices contracted, compared to recent years, and few bidding wars were noted.

Victor Loewy, the newly minted executive chairman at Alliance Films, said buyers were wary in Toronto after a poor summer at the box office for prestige indie titles.

‘People were careful. Everyone went through a bad summer,’ he said.

Loewy added he bought a host of titles for his U.K. and Spanish distribution outfits, and started negotiations on an output deal for Canada in Toronto.

Still, Toronto’s film bazaar left him shrugging his shoulders.

‘I didn’t see anything that I really wanted to buy or felt I missed,’ Loewy said.

Patrice Theroux, who has just launched a theatrical release division at Toronto-based specialty distributor Entertainment One, said he’s working on some deals coming out of the festival, but won’t announce details yet.

Despite the lack of films generating frenzied bidding this week in Toronto, Theroux declared the festival’s unofficial market a success.

‘At every festival, we hear the same complaint from buyers, that there’s nothing to buy. Maybe people are smarter, and not just chasing films because they’re being hyped,’ he said.

Festival organizers will now be left to ponder why movies that did impress in Toronto’s lineup — Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, Joe Wright’s Atonement and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild — came to town with distribution, and why those without deals going in rarely produced big-ticket sales.

Major producers like Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics came to Toronto with full slates and little appetite to add more titles. And, in all, 14 French movies came to Toronto with U.S. distribution in hand.

‘It’s exceptional. It just happens to be a good year for French films. It’s also a good year in the U.S. for French films,’ remarked John Kochman, director of Unifrance USA.

High hopes for a U.S. deal for French director Alain Corneau’s Le Deuxieme Souffle, starring Daniel Auteil and Monica Bellucci, which was booked into Roy Thomson Hall, came to naught in Toronto.

Other late market deals included the Canadian rights for 2929 Productions’ In Bloom going to TVA Films for around $1 million. But Magnolia Pictures, part of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s empire, picked up the U.S. rights to the Uma Thurman-starrer, so 2929 is effectively self-distributing its movie.

The Winnipeg-shot Walk All Over went for an undisclosed sum to the Weinstein Co. according to producer Carolyn McMaster.

‘It’s the first Canadian film [Harvey Weinstein has] bought in three years, from what I hear. We’re very excited, couldn’t be prouder,’ she says.

If anything, the biggest deals in Toronto this week were for films not screening at the festival. Miramax paid $5 million for the U.S. rights to the Niv Fichman-produced Blindness and Paramount Vantage prebought the North American, Latin American and Australian rights to the Kiera Knightley-starrer The Duchess for $7 million.

Equinoxe Films did a deal for the Canadian rights to three movies with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, including the Ryan Gosling-starrer Lars and the Real Girl.

The Toronto International Film Festival wraps on Saturday with an awards ceremony and Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic closing out the 2007 edition.
With files from Marise Strauss