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Denzel Washington's directorial debut, Eminem film highlight festival North America's biggest film showcase, the Toronto festival has become a key launching spot for studios' major fall releases, including Academy Awards hopefuls. The festival, which always begins with a movie by a Canadian filmmaker, opens Thursday night with Ararat, from writer-director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), who draws on his Armenian heritage to tell the tale of two modern estranged families. The cast includes Christopher Plummer, Eric Bogosian and Bruce Greenwood. The 27th annual festival runs through Sept. 14 and will feature 265 feature-length movies and 80 short films from 50 countries. A Proven Launching Pad American Beauty premiered at Toronto in 1999 and capitalized on its solid festival buzz to become an early awards front-runner, eventually winning best picture at the Oscars. Other films that have used Toronto as a springboard to awards and commercial success include Chariots of Fire, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Crying Game and Life Is Beautiful. Big titles this year include Denzel Washington's directing debut, Antwone Fisher, in which he co-stars as a Navy psychiatrist caring for a troubled sailor; Frida, directed by Julie Taymor (creator of the Broadway version of The Lion King) and starring Salma Hayek as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, wife of Diego Rivera; Far From Heaven, a 1950s-style melodrama about racial and sexual stereotypes starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid; The Four Feathers, with Heath Ledger in the story of a 19th century British soldier out to prove his valor after he's branded a coward; and Punch-Drunk Love, a comic romance starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia). The Eminem hip-hop drama 8 Mile, from director Curtis Hanson (Wonder Boys), will screen as a work-in-progress, a rare example of an unfinished film playing at the festival. The complete film is due in theaters this fall. "Of course, we do prefer having films come here in their finished, final form. But I also honestly don't have any trouble with filmmakers using the festival in that kind of way to get reaction of critics and audiences to a film still in the works," said festival director Piers Handling. The Film Lover's Fest Foreign-language highlights include Talk to Her, the latest from Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother); City of God, a stark portrait of violence and drugs among youths in Rio de Janeiro; and The Man Without a Past, the second-prize winner at last spring's Cannes Film Festival, about an amnesiac beating victim who finds romance in the slums of Helsinki. On the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which disrupted last year's event, the festival will screen 11'09"01, a collection of Sept. 11-themed short films - some of which have been criticized as anti-American - and The Guys, starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia in the tale of a New York City fire captain who must prepare eulogies for men killed in the attacks. Unlike festivals such as Cannes and Sundance, which cater more to people in the movie business, Toronto is known as a film lover's event. "This festival's great because the public gets to go, as opposed to others around the world that are mainly for press and the industry," said Sheena Nugent of Toronto, who already had bought tickets to 10 films and lined up at the festival box office Thursday morning for more. Many festivalgoers try to catch obscure movies they won't find later at their local mall cinema. Nugent's choices included the spelling-bee documentary Spellbound and the British soccer comedy Bend It Like Beckham. "I'm not likely to see things at the festival that I might see a month from now in mainstream theaters," said Rick Hughes of Toronto, who was in line for tickets to Flower and Garnet, a film made by a friend of his from Saskatchewan. "And I'm a little bit of a nationalist, so I lean a little toward anything Canadian."
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