Toronto, the IFP Filmmaker Conference hot on its heels, the New York Film Festival, and, for us, the close of our Fall issue — the season has begun. We’ve already begun work on the magazine, and I’m getting ready to go Toronto, where I’ll join Howard Feinstein and Livia Bloom contributing to the magazine and blog.

Of course, the best part of any festival experience is the serendipitous discovery, the word-of-mouth gem you were tipped to or the film you randomly walked into that turned out to be great. I hope to be telling you about some of those over the next week, but, in the meantime, here are a few films from the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2010 edition that I’m already looking forward to.

I know little about Ming Wong’s…

Tiny Furniture director Lena Dunham, one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of 2009,” will write, direct the pilot for, and co-executive produce a new HBO series exec produced by Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner, reports Nellie Andreeva at Deadline Hollywood. The piece says the series “is expected to feature autobiographical elements”

From Deadline:

“Lena has a unique, truthful comic voice,” Apatow said. “I am excited to work with her and learn from her.” Konner said she was “obsessed with working with Lena” since HBO’s entertainment president Sue Naegle gave her a copy of Tiny Furniture. “She has a staggeringly honest point of view and hilarious clear…

Here are a few articles, links and videos that caught my eye this week:

The shape of documentaries to come may be revealed by Prison Valley, which won the second FRANCE24-Radio France International Web Documentary Award last week. From France 24′s article about the new media doc by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault:

Created by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault, the striking multimedia production takes viewers to the heart of Canon City, “a distant place that is home to 36,000 souls and 13 prisons.”

Produced by the French company Upian and distributed by Arte.tv, Prison Valley, is an interactive journey into the prison industry in the United States. Released in April, the web documentary is the result of months of investigative…

I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel.

The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year:

Writer-director Jeff Mizushima won the Filmmaker To Watch Award at CineVegas this year for Etienne!, an…

Producer Gavin Polone’s presumably ex- current assistant has made one of those Xtranormal videos where you submit text and use the service to make a robotically-voiced animated short. This was sent to me this week by a friend who attested to its validity, and now, Nikki Finke gets confirmation from Polone (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Zombieland) himself. He is quoted, “Sadly, it isn’t altogether untrue. People seem to like it. Maybe it will inspire an HBO series about me?”

Some enterprising curator should assemble the best of these Xtranormal videos. They’d make an oddly compelling full-evening show.