Toronto Film Fest Sees Stars

TORONTO—Canadian casinos, beware: George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle of Ocean's Eleven (not to mention Twelve and Thirteen) fame are among the more than 500 international film stars set to attend the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 6-15.

The red carpets will stretch out across the city this year, as Jennifers Garner and Connelly, Woodys Harrelson and Allen, and Michaels Douglas and Moore debut their latest films. Theirs are just a few among the nearly 350 features and shorts from 55 countries that will be shown in Toronto and enjoyed by more than 300,000 film fans.

The supernova of world film festivals, Toronto enjoys a deserved reputation for hosting Hollywood's biggest stars and launching its blockbusters while giving screen time to rising filmmakers at home and abroad.

• Last year's mockumentary The Assassination of President Bush stirred waves with its political themes, and this year many filmmakers are jumping on that wagon. "The political situation in Iraq," featured directly or indirectly, "is one of the many themes in this year's festival," said festival codirector Noah Cowan.
  
  
• Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal star in Rendition, a horrifying tale of what happens when American authorities, blindly obsessed by the war on terror, take an innocent man and fly him to a country where they can use any means necessary to extract a confession from him.
  
  
• Redacted is director Brian De Palma's story of American soldiers in the ancient Iraqi city of Samarra. Using a mix of styles and shifting points of view, the dusty fog and violence of the Iraq war is presented with the personal fogs and violence of the soldiers, media and Iraqis caught up in the horrors of the real events the film is based on.
  
  
• Those famous veteran brothers from the Civil War, Jesse and Frank James, are featured in The Assassination of Jesse  James by the Coward Robert Ford. Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise Parker and Paul Schneider, the film takes a new and deeper look at the life and death of the passionate outlaw.
  
  
• Canadian racism is put under the spotlight in Poor Boy's Game, which lands its blows in a story about black and white boxers in Halifax. It stars Rossif Sutherland (Donald Sutherland's less famous son) and Danny Glover.
  
  
• World War II is the opening backdrop of Fugitive Pieces, about a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland who is smuggled into Greece and raised by the man who rescued him. But it is the postwar story of the boy's struggle for identity as he grows into a man that's at the heart of this tale.
  
  
• Michael Moore returns to Toronto with Captain Mike Across America, a cheeky film about Moore's concert-like political education campaign running alongside the 2004 presidential election.
  
  
• Former President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn make their mark as the first former residents of the White House to attend Toronto. Carter is the subject of a documentary about his efforts to promote world peace and better understanding between people since leaving office in 1980.
  
  
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei dazzle in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a thriller about two brothers' botched attempt to rob their own family's jewelry store.
  
  
• George Clooney stars in Michael Clayton, written and directed by Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Devil's Advocate). Clooney is a high-powered legal "fixer" who finds himself in a swirl of ethical and personal crises when his mentor has a nervous breakdown.
  
  
• Canadian comedy gets a stage at the festival in Young People F--king, a spoof of the country's rash of cheap horror films produced in the 1970s.

Toronto "is a forum for debate and to contend with the issues of the day, and also to congratulate and celebrate those who push the medium of film forward. When we do both, it's ideal," Cowan said.