A lot of superlatives are being tossed around ahead of this year's Toronto International Film Festival - Most World Premières! Most Countries Ever! Record Number of Female Directors!
All auspicious achievements, to be sure. But the blinding star power expected to light up the city as the 11-day event kicks off Thursday is bound to quickly steer chatter back to the more usual distinctions - Hottest Lead, Cutest Ingenue, Surefire Oscar Contender, Audience Favourite.
For your consideration, attendees expected to showcase new projects at the fest include Ben Affleck, Ryan Gosling, Robert Redford, Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon, Joaquin Phoenix, Keira Knightley, Tom Hanks, Kristen Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The celebrity guest list goes on and on, but artistic director Cameron Bailey is also highlighting the record 72 countries represented at the fest (up from 65 last year) and the fact that 25 per cent of this year's slate is directed by women.
"The diversity of the festival seems to be the real story for us this year," says Bailey, clearly immune to constant Gosling-Mendes wedding speculation and Stewart's tabloid-fodder trysts.
"That may possibly be the largest and broadest representation globally that we've ever had."
The female contingent is especially noteworthy given the lashing the Cannes Film Festival suffered back in May when its competition failed to include any women. Toronto's slate includes 91 female directors, six of them with prestigious gala slots.
TIFF boss Piers Handling says criticism of Cannes had no bearing when his programmers assembled their roster, although he admitted that gender representation is something they're "conscious of."
"The quality of the film is, at the end of the day, always the deciding factor, especially when it comes to the gala program," says Handling, noting the big titles must withstand the scrutiny of the international press.
"You don't set out with any quotas in mind but some of the best films we saw this year were obviously directed by women that we wanted to put in very, very prominent positions."
That includes Sally Potter's Ginger and Rosa and Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, neither of which were ready for Cannes. Chief among the Canadian slate is Deepa Mehta's ambitious adaptation of the Salman Rushdie novel Midnight's Children.
Nevertheless, if there is one popularity game TIFF freely admits to playing, it's chasing the next Oscar sensation - and there are several titles that could make waves come awards time. They include the Weinstein Company's period drama The Master - a weighty offering directed by Paul Thomas Anderson that's said to be inspired by Scientology. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a charismatic spiritual guru and Joaquin Phoenix as a troubled war veteran.
Affleck returns to the director's chair for his political thriller Argo, in which he also stars alongside Bryan Cranston, John Goodman and Alan Arkin. It's about a CIA agent who tries to rescue six U.S. citizens held hostage in Iran by pretending they are a Canadian film crew.
And Hanks hits the red carpet with his centuriessweeping film Cloud Atlas, a massive mash-up of six stories and time periods stretching from the 19th century to a distant future. Its dizzying celeb cast includes Sarandon, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Hugo Weaving and Jim Broadbent.
Also sure to draw attention is Paltrow and Mark Ruffalo's ensemble comedy Thanks for Sharing, Terrence Malick's exploration of love To the Wonder, the West Memphis Three documentary West of Memphis, which is being promoted by Depp, and Spike Lee's Michael Jackson documentary Bad 25.
But there are notable films missing: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, is skipping the fest even after Bigelow's Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker made its North American première at the 2008 edition.
And then there's Ang Lee's ambitious Life of Pi, based on the Yann Martel novel about a zookeeper's son sent adrift on the ocean with a Bengal tiger. Instead, the Montreal-shot fantasy is opening the New York Film Festival immediately after TIFF.
"Not even Cannes gets all the films they want," Handling explains simply. "Clearly, we're after every single film that's out there but some films just decide for a variety of reasons not to come to us."
"I think the glass is more than half full," Bailey adds. "We're really lucky that through timing and through our perseverance we were able to get this killer lineup."
The Toronto International Film Festival runs from Sept. 6-16.
