The Toronto International Film Festival will feature 70 Canadian films at this year's 10-day event, including world premieres of Atom Egoyan's thriller Chloe , Dilip Mehta's New Delhi-based comedy Cooking With Stella and the much-anticipated romantic drama Cairo Time from Montreal's Ruba Nadda.
At a packed press conference yesterday at Toronto's Fairmont Royal York hotel, TIFF organizers also announced that American director Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (with co-stars Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, filling in the lead role vacated by the untimely death of Australian actor Heath Ledger) will be a North American premiere gala.
In special presentations, the festival will also showcase the feature-film directorial debuts of Vancouver-bred Peter Stebbings ( Defendor with Woody Harrelson, Kat Dennings and Sandra Oh) and 20-year-old Quebecker Xavier Dolan's English-Canadian premiere for J'ai Tue Ma Mere (I Killed My Mother) .
“This year we had 804 submissions and 200 were feature films,” TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey said, adding that the volume is a strong indicator of just how vibrant this country's film industry currently is. “For the past few weeks, we've been sitting mostly in dark screening rooms ... and I can't tell you how happy I am today to be surrounded by so many Canadian filmmakers.”
Montreal writer/actor/director Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky , starring Jay Baruchel as a Montreal high-school student channelling his inner Red Army hero Leon Trotsky, also scored a special presentation, along with Oscar winner Brigitte Berman's biopic of Playboy's founder, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel . (Berman took home an Academy Award in 1987 for her documentary Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got ).
Nadda's $4-million film Cairo Time features an international cast, including Oscar-nominated Patricia Clarkson ( Pieces of April , Far From Heaven ), Sudanese-born actor Alexander Siddig ( Syriana , Kingdom of Heaven ), Spain's Elena Anaya ( Savage Grace , Sex and Lucia ) and Winnipeg's Tom McCamus ( The Sweet Hereafter , Shake Hands With the Devil ).
Written and directed by 36-year-old Nadda, whose earlier work includes 2005's Sabah , it's the story of Juliette (Clarkson), a woman in her late 40s who arrives in Cairo to meet her United Nations-employed husband (McCamus) for a vacation, only to be told that he has been delayed in Gaza. He sends his friend Tareq (Siddig), a retired Egyptian police officer, to pick her up – and the romantic tale unravels from there.
Cooking With Stella , distributed by Toronto's Mongrel Media, is a warmhearted social satire about a Canadian diplomat (Lisa Ray) and her chef husband, Michael (Don McKellar), who are posted to New Delhi, where they inherit a household of Indian servants, including the wily cook Stella (Seema Biswas).
Egoyan's Chloe , shot in Toronto and filmed during the tragic death of Liam Neeson's wife, Natasha Richardson, after a ski accident in Quebec, is the story of David (Neeson), whose wife, Catherine (Julianne Moore), is convinced that her husband is cheating on her. She hires a young woman, Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), to test his infidelity.
Stebbings's original script for The Defendor , written four years ago, follows Arthur Poppington (Harrelson), a mentally challenged guy who fantasizes about an alter-ego – a superhero known as Defendor, who combs the city streets at night in search of his archenemy, Captain Industry, with an unlikely sidekick, a young prostitute, Kat (Dennings).
The festival also announced yesterday that the closing-night gala will be a feisty portrait of Queen Victoria from French-Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée ( C.R.A.Z.Y. ) called The Young Victoria . Based on a script from British-based Academy Award-winner Julian Fellowes ( Gosford Park ), the film chronicles the queen's (Emily Blunt) ascension to the throne, focusing on her early, rocky years of her reign, romance and marriage to Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). The cast also includes Paul Bettany ( The Da Vinci Code ).
