The Directors

You know your film festival is a hit when people nearly kill each other to get into the screening of a movie they couldn't be paid to see elsewhere. At last year's Toronto International Film Festival, that film was the British docudrama Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the tracking of his killer. Outside the theater, people begged to get in as if it were the one and only Beatles reunion. Yet when the film opened in North America a month later, it earned just $519,086. No matter, at least to festival junkies. Toronto — TIFF to its fans — had chalked up another sensation.

A lovelier chaos, because it hinted at a looming cultural phenomenon, came last year with the midnight screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Or rather the nonscreening; the movie broke down and had to be rescheduled. Outside the theater, star Sacha Baron Cohen, in character, was dragged to the cinema in a cart by a gaggle of actresses playing Kazakh wenches. Two months later, the film was released, and real people got to see what all the insanity was about. Borat grossed more than $100 million Stateside, and Baron Cohen got an Oscar nomination.

The fomentors and beneficiaries of all this divine madness are the festival's two bosses: Piers Handling, chairman and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, and Noah Cowan, TIFF's co-director. They supervise a team of a dozen programmers who make this sprawling event the world's best 10-day movie binge. Europe may have those venerable showcases Cannes, Berlin and Venice, but the crazy intensity of Toronto — the too-much-of-a-muchness — makes it utterly American. Or, as Canadians would no doubt gently correct: utterly North American.

For Handling, one major difference between Toronto and the European fests is in the structure. "The films there are competitive — they give a prize at the end — and the festivals compete with each other. You can't have a film in the Cannes competition if it's already been in Berlin. But because we're noncompetitive, we can show everything."

Yet there is a strenuous competition in Toronto: for the discriminating moviegoer's time. This year there'll be 349 films on offer; that's something like 500 hours of movies, and no one can see even a quarter of what's available. "We serve so many different masters here, so many different audiences," says Handling, "that there's leeway to program the widest range of films, from the most populist to the most esoteric." So each movie lover scans the list, finds a couple dozen promising titles and creates a personal minifestival.

For some, TIFF is an Oscar reunion party; this year's 500-plus guest list of actors, directors and producers includes more than a score of Academy Award winners, from George Clooney to Jodie Foster, Sean Penn to Susan Sarandon, Michael Caine and Michael Douglas to Michael Moore. The new hot couple, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, will show up to promote their politically charged drama Rendition; and perpetual hottie Brad Pitt will light up the city when he appears in support of his western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Rock icons Lou Reed and Eddie Vedder will be there, as will former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the subject of Jonathan Demme's documentary Man from Plains.

All that red-carpet glamour, and the hope of a first look at next year's Oscar finalists, attracts audiences to the big-ticket galas and special presentations. It also lures a sizable number of other power brokers: Hollywood execs, for whom Toronto has become a crucial harbinger of the movie-award season, and U.S. film critics, avid to see grown-up pictures after a fast-food summer diet of action epics with numerals.