TORONTO — At the Toronto International Film Festival, you never quite know what you’ll get: a tearful standing ovation, a chance encounter with a movie star in a dive bar or a bizarre screening mishap that becomes the stuff of legend.

Filmmakers, programmers and industry insiders have seen it all — and ahead of the festival's 50th edition, they share their funniest, strangest and most nerve-racking stories from years on the circuit.

Piers Handling, former TIFF CEO

Moments before the 1995 premiere of acclaimed French filmmaker Claude Sautet’s drama “Nelly et M. Arnaud” at Roy Thompson Hall, Handling says he witnessed a side of the director unlike anything he had ever seen.

In the green room, he told Sautet in French that a few sponsored Canadian short films would be screened before the

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