The 2004 Toronto Film Festival will screen 321 features and short films from 61 countries. Themes range from sex and AIDS to metaphysics and temperamental stage actresses.
Among the festival's 100 world premieres are István Szabó's Being Julia, starring Annette Bening; David O. Russell's comedy I Heart Huckabees, featuring Naomi Watts, Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg, Dustin Hoffman, and Lily Tomlin; and two biopics: Beyond the Sea, directed by Kevin Spacey, who also stars as 1950s-60s singer and actor Bobby Darin; and Bill Condon's Kinsey, which stars Liam Neeson as controversial sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who created a furor in the postwar years with his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Other Toronto festival highlights include The Good Woman, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan starring Helen Hunt; Jean-Luc Godard's Notre musique; and a series of films set in South Africa, among them Red Dust, with Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, and Darrell Roodt's AIDS-themed Yesterday, reportedly the first film to be shot in the Zulu language.
The ten-day Toronto Film Festival begins September 9.