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Salman Rushdie

THE FILM adaptation of Midnight’s Children by Booker-winning British author Salman Rushdie and movies from Mumbai are among the highlights at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Opening on September 6 and widely considered a kick-off to the Oscar season, the 37th edition of the festival will also feature films starring Ryan Gosling, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro, as well as Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut.

India-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta is the director of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which features Indian actors Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor and Shabana Azmi.

Time-travel thriller Looper, directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as a time-travelling assassin assigned to kill his future self, will be the opening film at the festival.

“I think (it) will set a very different, very important tone,” said festival director Piers Handling, acknowledging that starting this year’s event with an action movie makes a statement.

“For your opening-night film, you want a film that actually commands the screen, that is entertaining, that people will really enjoy and get their heads into the rest of the festival.”

Also aiming to fill seats will be political thriller Argo, helmed by and starring Affleck, Redford’s In the Company You Keep, about a civil-rights lawyer exposed as a fugitive for murder and the hotly anticipated Cloud Atlas, an adaptation of the best-selling novel starring Hanks and Halle Berry, directed by Twyker and Matrix co-directors Andy and Lana Wachowski.

There will also be 10 films from Mumbai as part of TIFF’s “City-to-City” programme, which spotlights a different locale each year.

TIFF enjoys a good record of unearthing films that go on to success at the Academy Awards, such as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech, which both won best-film Oscars.

Fans of British comedy troupe Monty Python will likely be intrigued by A Liar’s Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, a tongue-in-cheek animated account of the life of troupe member Chapman, who died in 1989 of cancer.

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