TORONTO--George W. Bush, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore make for unlikely company, but their presence here is making for huge buzz as the Toronto International Film Festival prepares to kick off.

While the President isn't appearing in person at the fest, he is casting a big shadow over the affair. Death of a President, a fictional documentary from Brit director Gabriel Range about the assassination of President Bush, is "easily the most dangerous and breathtakingly original film I have encountered this year," says festival codirector Noah Cowan.

It's also one of the most controversial. Right-wing bloggers are eviscerating Range over the film, which uses digitally altered imagery to depict Bush's murder at the hand of a Syrian-born gunman.

"It's a striking premise," Range says in a statement. "But it's a serious film which I hope will open up the debate on where current U.S. foreign and domestic polices are taking us."

Bush also looms large in the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing. Shot by Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, the film chronicles the backlash suffered by the trio after lead singer Natalie Maines said the Texas trio was "ashamed" to share their home state with the President.

Moore will screen excerpts from two forthcoming documentaries, The Great '04 Slacker Uprising, about the last presidential election, and Sicko, his screed on the health-care industry.

Penn, meanwhile, stars in the remake of All the King's Men. The film, a serious drama of political and moral corruption in Louisiana in the 1930s, hopes to launch its Academy Award assault when it premieres later this week.

While the sitting commander in chief is sitting out the festival, another is planning to attend. Former President Bill Clinton is due on the scene for an all-star party marking his 60th b-day.

Toronto is set to become Hollywood North for the coming days, with 300,000 movie buffs expected to attend, whether they're actually sitting through this year's record-breaking 352 feature films and shorts (215 are world or North American premieres), ogling the seemingly endless parade of stars and filmmakers or looking to secure distribution rights to a crop of would-be Oscar contenders.

"Toronto's audiences are sophisticated and film hungry," says Andrea Grau, the festival?s director of communications.

Now in its 31st year, the Toronto festival has grown from a rag-tag, off-the-radar event to arguably most important film festival in the world. Festivals like Cannes, which have a heavy market element to them, "distract people from the films themselves," says Grau. "In Toronto, it's all about the films."

The films and the stars. The paparazzi are already swarming in anticipation of red-carpet events featuring the likes of Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffman, Reese Witherspoon, Morgan Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jennifer Lopez, Yoko Ono, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Pen?lope Cruz, Jennifer Connelly, Juliette Binoche, Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz, Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, Sandra Bullock, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins, William H. Macy and Will Ferrell.

Canadian native son Paul Haggis, who followed up his 2005 Oscar win for his Million Dollar Baby screenplay with two more this year for Crash, goes for the threepeat with his newest film, The Last Kiss, starring Zach Braff.

Away from Her, starring Canadian Sara Polley in her directorial debut, is considered a hot-ticket films, along with Werner Herzog's true-life escape story, Rescue Dawn, and The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky's long-in-the-works sci-fi romance.

Bullock, meanwhile, costars with Toby Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig and Sigourney Weaver in Infamous, an examination of Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood. The similarly themed Capote was boosted into the Oscar race after a strong showing at last year's Toronto fest, eventually scoring a statuette for star Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Ferrell looks to builds some award buzz acting dramatic opposite Emma Thompson in the eccentric Stranger Than Fiction. Forrest Whitaker channels Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Brosnan is on the run from Neeson in the Civil War saga Seraphim Falls. Crowe plays a high-powered broker who stops and smells the baguettes in Provence in Ridley Scott's A Good Year. Pitt stars in Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu's Babel part of an Oscar-caliber cast that also includes Blanchett and Gael Garc?a Bernal. And Anthony Minghella, an Academy Award winner for The English Patient, will unveil Breaking and Entering, a drama set in inner-city London starring Law, Binoche, Robin Wright Penn and Martin Freeman.

Larry Charles looks to bring the funny with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, while Christopher Guest and his improv troupe (Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara and Parker Posey) tackle award shows in the satire For Your Consideration.

Among the documentaries expected to draw big crowds is Lionsgate's The U.S. vs. John Lennon, another politically charged film about how the musician became an anti-war activist.

The fest kicks off Thursday with a Canadian entry, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, about the first interaction between native Inuits and Europeans. It closes Sept. 16 with British director Michael Apted's Amazing Grace, a costume drama about anti-slavery crusader William Wilburforce.