For the first time in its history, the Toronto International Film Festival will open with a documentary.
The announcement this morning that TIFF 2011 will kick off with Davis Guggenheim’s U2 doc From The Sky Down – commemorating the 20th anniversary of the release of the band’s Achtung Baby – came as a genuine surprise to a press corps that had been betting on seeing David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz or even Don Shebib’s Down The Road Again named the opener.
Festival directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey said the choice of From The Sky Down followed logically from last year’s selection of Score! A Hockey Musical. If 2010 marked the first time the festival opened with a musical, it made sense to have another first for 2011.
Cronenberg and Polley’s films were among the galas announced today, along with Luc Besson’s The Lady, starring Michelle Yeoh as Burmese democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi George Clooney’s The Ides Of March, a political drama starring Clooney and Ryan Gosling Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, and Madonna’s W.E., starring Abbie Cornish, James D’Arcy and Andrea Riseborough.
In the Special Presentations program, this year’s bounty includes Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus, starring Fiennes and Gerard Butler Jonathan Levine’s 50/50, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick Fernando Meirelles’s 360, with Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Rachel Weisz Oren Moverman’s Rampart, with Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver Alexander Payne’s The Descendents, with George Clooney, Judy Greer and Robert Forster, and Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends With Kids, starring Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm and Megan Fox.
TIFF will also host the North American premieres of Cannes entries such as Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, all playing as Special Presentations.
Incidentally, U2 isn’t the only band getting a 20th anniversary celebration at this year’s TIFF. Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Twenty – marking the director’s return to TIFF after the disastrous premiere of Elizabethtown in 2005 – will be screened as a Special Presentation.
Handling and Bailey also announced that the festival had commissioned a short film to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 – though they declined to provide any details as to the nature of the short, or even to name its director.
The Toronto International Film Festival opens Thursday, September 8th.
