TIFF's 2011 celebrity lineup a giddy mix of movie and rock stars

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The Toronto International Film Festival has unveiled only about half of this year's lineup – but it's already a veritable who's who of the biggest names in movies, as well as rock 'n' roll.

Opening the festival will be rock gods U2, the subjects of new documentary From the Sky Down by Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim ( An Inconvenient Truth). The film marks the first time in the festival's 36-year history that a doc has been chosen for the coveted kick-off slot.

"It's pretty cool, isn't it?" said a grinning Piers Handling, TIFF's director and CEO, as his opening-night announcement on Tuesday was met with an audible gasp from the crowd. "I've been a fan of U2 since I was a teenager, and Guggenheim's feature is a perfect fit since it explores what this festival is all about: maintaining creativity and staying fresh."

The U2 biopic will be joined by Pearl Jam Twenty, a documentary that carves the story of Pearl Jam from more than 1,200 hours of rarely seen footage. Cameron Crowe – who won an Academy Award for his movie about groupies, Almost Famous – is directing.

Excitement was palpable in the jammed Toronto hotel room where members of the press got first word of the 2011 lineup, particularly when Handling hinted that the lion's share of the celebrities attached to the films – George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Madonna, Jennifer Garner, Kirsten Dunst, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave – would be showing their beautiful mugs on the red carpet come September.

"I anticipate every name in the line-up will come," Handling said after the press conference, breaking from a long-standing tradition of extreme secrecy around star guests, who are usually confirmed only late in August. "These actors have been coming on a regular basis, and they recognize Toronto is a must-attend venue to promote their films."

Local talent will be part of TIFF's star power: Torontonians David Cronenberg and Sarah Polley will both be having gala premieres.

A low-key Polley was on hand to talk about her film, Take This Waltz. She said TIFF is the ideal place to launch her new relationship drama because "the film is really a love song to Toronto in many ways." Shot in the city over 35 days last summer, the movie stars Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby and Sarah Silverman in an exploration of what long-term relationships do to love, sex and self-image.

"The film really celebrates Toronto in the summer, in that kind of sweltering, colourful way I hadn't seen captured on film before," said the diminutive director and actress, who penned the script after reading several books about "desire and emptiness."

Polley described the process of making Take This Waltz as "the easiest shoot" she's ever worked on. "Everyone was just in a really good mood all the time," she said. "It was probably the easiest cast I'll ever get to work with as a filmmaker. I think it only happens once in a career."

Cronenberg has also been shooting in Toronto – for his next film, Cosmopolis, a thriller starring Twilight vampire-saga heartthrob Robert Pattinson. Still in post-production on that movie, Cronenberg was not at the TIFF announcement, but the buzz is still high for his festival offering, A Dangerous Method, starring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender. A historical drama set on the eve of the First World War, it explores the real-life love triangle of legendary psychiatrists Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud and the woman who came between them.

Other world premiere galas announced on Tuesday include a new film from Madonna (yes, that one) called W.E – a love story inspired by Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII starring Abbie Cornish ( Bright Star, Sucker Punch); Luc Besson's hotly anticipated film about Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady, starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis; Moneyball, Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis's bestseller about Oakland As manager Billy Beane, starring Brad Pitt; and Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt, a murder mystery starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning.

George Clooney, meanwhile, has two feature films at TIFF: his own political drama The Ides of March, with Canadian star Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a starring role in The Descendants, a heart-wrenching family drama from Alexander Payne ( Sideways) about an indifferent father of two girls who has to reassess his life after his wife has a boating accident.

Gosling – who plays an ambitious press secretary whose involvement in a political scandal threatens his candidate's shot at the presidency in The Ides of March – is also expected to show up to help promote the thriller Drive, which netted Nicolas Winding Refn a best director prize this spring at the Cannes Film Festival.

Other titles in TIFF's special-presentations announcement on Tuesday include Wang Xiaoshuai's 11 Flowers, about a boy harbouring a murderer, and Jonathan Levine's 50/50, a comedy about cancer (you read that correctly) with Canadian Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt ( Inception) and Anna Kendrick ( Up in the Air).

TIFF also plans to mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States with a short film that will screen the first Sunday.

Handling acknowledged the giddy buzz that seems to be building for TIFF 2011, predicting that his 11-day festival "could be our biggest year yet."

The Toronto International Film Festival runs from Sept. 8-18. For information, visit tiff.net.