The 26th annual World Film Festival begins unreeling tonight, and if the organizers are to be believed, it's the biggest publicly attended A-category competitive film festival in the Western hemisphere.
There will be 406 films screened -- 248 are world and international premieres -- and organizers are predicting an attendance of about 400,000, which is similar to the past two years.
This year's lineup does include some impressive heavyweight fare:
French director François Ozon's Eight Women, an eagerly anticipated film that melds an Agatha Christie-like mystery with elements of the musical genre.
Invincible, the latest from German director Werner Herzog, based on a true story about a naive Jewish circus performer in the 1930s who works for a fascist showman.
Stanislaw Mucha's Absolut Warhola, a documentary profiling the Slovakian town that boasts a Warhol Museum and many of the late artist's relatives.
As well, the festival will include a focus on Japanese cinema, with an anthology of 11 films chosen from the past two years of that country's national cinema. And a new section, African Horizons, has been added. This year 17 entries from the continent will be screened. (The World event took heat years ago for all but ignoring films from Africa.)
The notoriously press-shy founder and director-general of the festival, Serge Losique, has consistently disdained any comparisons of his festival to the Toronto International Film Festival, which most critics now argue has stolen the top film-festival spot in North America.
In distancing his event from the TIFF, Losique has repeatedly stated that the real stars of his festival are the movies themselves. Indeed, when the World festival has attempted to boast of celebrity power, it has occasionally opened itself up to ridicule. Take four years ago, when Sandra Bullock was given an award for lifetime achievement -- a case of premature adulation, critics charged.
This year, Losique appears to be getting it right on the star-power front: Forget vast droves of semi-notable names, sidestep Toronto's Hollywood Squares syndrome and go for a few choice candidates.
Gérard Depardieu will attend this week, as will New Wave visionary Jean-Luc Godard, who will deliver several lectures on cinema. And though Toronto may lay claim to hundreds of visiting actors, they didn't get Robert De Niro, who will attend the World event to launch the premiere of his latest film, City by the Sea. Though his career has careened into self-parody of late, City by the Sea is reportedly a shift back to more serious form for the actor.
The other area where the World event has dramatically improved is in its inclusion of home-grown cinema. In the past, Losique infuriated Quebec filmmakers by including very little local product. This year, Manon Briand's eagerly anticipated second feature, La turbulence des fluides, which stars Pascale Bussières and Geneviève Bujold, will open the festival. Briand's last film, 2 Seconds, was the hit of the 1998 event, winning over audiences and critics alike and picking up four of the festival's awards.
As well, the festival will screen Je me souviens, Thierry Le Brun's NFB documentary examination of the historical underpinnings of Quebec's famous unofficial motto. And Oscar-winning NFB documentary filmmaker Beverly Shaffer will debut her latest, To My Birthmother, the emotionally jarring odyssey of an adopted woman who decides she wants to track down her biological mother.
The work of two young filmmakers will also be presented: Ben Duffield's short Road Rage,a tightly wound suspense yarn about an angry, harrowing chase between Montreal drivers; and Claudia Morgado's Bitten, another sharply drawn surreal short. The Montreal World Film Festival begins today and runs until Sept. 2. For information: 514-848-3883 or