Film festival
Toronto festival lines up stars
BBC, Online
Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington and Nicolas Cage are among the big Hollywood names who have been lined up for next month's Toronto Film Festival. Organisers said the stellar line-up was "a relief" after the city's problems with the SARS crisis and North American power-cut.Toronto hosts one of the year's most major film festivals, and this year's event--to begin on 4 September--will include 64 world premières. It will coincide with the Deauville festival in France, which has just announced that Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski will chair its jury. And actor Harrison Ford will be the main attraction on the town's red carpet to promote his new film Hollywood Homicide, organisers have said. But Toronto is seen as the more important event with greater pulling power, and Anthony Hopkins, Francis Ford Coppola, Cate Blanchett and Meg Ryan are also expected to travel to the Canadian city. "The fact they're here is obviously for us a great sigh of relief... their presence at the festival is going to electrify this city," festival director Piers Handling said. "I think it's just a recognition of how important the festival has become in the eyes of the international industry." Among the films to be showcased there will be Girl With a Pearl Earring, based on Tracy Chevalier's novel and starring Colin Firth as 17th Century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Also on show will be Richard Linklater's The School of Rock, starring Jack Black as a hard-up rock star, who hopes to get back to the top. And director Ridley Scott will introduce a director's cut of his classic Alien, including previously unseen footage. It had already been announced that Love Actually, the directorial debut of Notting Hill writer Richard Curtis, will get its world première at the event. The festival will close with Danny Deckchair, an Australian film about a man who lifts off in a deckchair tied to helium balloons. The 10-day event was worth almost $50m (£30m) to the local economy last year. Handling said the festival had come through some "pretty major crises" in its recent history. "Air strikes and postal strikes, projectionists' strikes, we went through 9/11 in the middle of our festival. I think we'll roll with the punches," he said. TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL336 films
64 world premières
55 countries represented
28,340 minutes of film
545 minutes - longest film, West of the Tracks
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