Jennifer's Body - the much anticipated second film from screenwriter Diablo Cody and Montreal-born director/producer Jason Reitman, who teamed up on the Oscar-winning Juno - will open the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness program in September.
Billed as a comedy/horror movie about a teenage cheerleader possessed by a hungry demon, the film, shot in Vancouver and starring Hollywood starlet Megan Fox, was part of an extensive lineup of documentaries, features and avant-garde films announced yesterday. Another with strong Canadian content is the doc The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, which follows the band during its 2007 trek across the country playing unannounced gigs at a series of unusual locales, including a Saskatoon bowling alley and a youth drop-in centre in Edmonton.
The documentary slate includes 17 titles, heavily tilted toward pressing some hot-button contemporary issues. These include the world premieres of Collapse (from American director Chris Smith), about apocalyptic visionary Michael Ruppert, and Colony (from Irish directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell), about the precipitous decline of bee-keeping colonies.
As well, the festival will see the international premiere of Google Baby (from Israel's Zippi Brand Frank), about an Indian entrepreneur who organizes surrogate mothers to carry embryos for couples who can't have a child.
The film opens with an Indian doctor performing a cesarean operation while talking on a cellphone.
Thom Powers, Tiff's documentary programmer, says it's rare for the doc category to have a dominant theme, but this year it does - the portrait of "a world out of balance."
Other feature-length docs that focus on recent events include How to Fold a Flag (from directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein), which examines the lives of American soldiers returning from Iraq and Videocracy (from Sweden's Erik Gandini), which looks at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi's media empire.
Also at the festivla will be Bassidji, from Iranian Mehran Tamadon, a secular liberal émigré who returned to Iran and spent three years immersed in the heart of the Muslim fundamentalist Bassidji paramilitary force.
Even a family-oriented documentary like Turtle: The Incredible Journey, from director Nick Stringer, touches upon the question of climate and oceanic change and the survival of species.
Powers's documentary collection also includes a range of other popular subjects, including The Art of the Steal (from American Don Argott), about what happened to the valuable Barnes collection of post-Impressionist paintings after the death of their owner, Albert Barnes (the Philadelphia collection was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1994) and Good Hair (from American director Jeff Stilson), in which comedian Chris Rock looks at African American hair culture.
The Midnight Madness program, now in its 22nd year, is programmed by Colin Geddes, who says he's chosen 10 films guaranteed to "rock your socks off."
His list was whittled down from more than 200 films he screened at festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Hong Kong.