Deepa Mehta's Water debuts at festival

CREDIT: Tyler Anderson/National Post Water Director Deepa Mehta and Star Lisa Ray arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival's opening night gala, which was held at Roy Thomson Hall.

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TORONTO -- It's all in the numbers.

This is the 30th annual Toronto International Film Festival and over 10 days it will screen 335 films from 52 countries. Eighty-four per cent of the titles are world, international or North American premieres.

Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's Water, the third in her elements trilogy that also includes 1996's Fire and 1998's Earth, was chosen as the Thursday night opening gala.

"It's fabulous," Mehta gushed as she arrived on the red carpet. "I don't feel any pressure, I just feel honoured."

Mehta's film represents the international scope of the festival. It is also a film that courted controversy. Her story, of a child bride (eight years old) in pre-independence India who is exiled to a widow's ashram after her husband's death, so offended Hindu fundamentalists that they violently attacked her on-location set in Varanasi in 2000. After facing riots, fires and death threats, Mehta and her crew packed it in and closed down the production. She returned to Canada instead to make a light, race-themed romantic comedy, Bollywood Hollywood.

But Mehta eventually went to Sri Lanka to finish Water.

She says she never set out to create controversy and was legitimately surprised by the backlash it initially received.

"It's a humanist film. And it belongs to humanity and how important compassion is in a world that's gone slightly nuts.''

Lisa Ray, who plays the widow Kalyani, praised Mehta for the way she nurtured the cast and her dedication to the film.

"I think she entrusted me with a great responsibility with this particular role. There were no stumbling blocks for me but I definitely felt I had to put in more than 100 per cent.''

Meanwhile, Toronto's reputation as Hollywood North will be fully realized in the days ahead by visits from more than 500 filmmakers and actors, including the likes of Cameron Diaz (In Her Shoes), Gwyneth Paltrow (Proof) and Keira Knightley (Pride and Prejudice), as well as Anthony Hopkins, Viggo Mortensen, Reese Witherspoon, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, the list just goes on and on.

"There are so many guests coming to the festival it's absolutely extraordinary," says festival director Piers Handling, who insists the festival is not really growing nor has it become too big for its britches.

Among the high-profile films will be Niki Caro's North Country, a sort of latter-day Norma Rae that boasts a cast with three, count 'em, three Oscar-winning actresses: Charlize Theron, Sissy Spacek and Frances McDormand.

Ang Lee will be bringing his latest, Brokeback Mountain, a 1960s cowboy tale filmed in Alberta, while Steve Martin delivers Shopgirl, adapted from his novella, with Claire Danes.

Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz) is presenting his new feature documentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and there is considerable buzz over whether Dylan himself will show.

Canada's top filmmakers, the artistically inclined Atom Egoyan and the more populist David Cronenberg, will be in tandem once more with films they already premiered at Cannes. Egoyan's film, Where the Truth Lies, deals with sex, while Cronenberg's A History of Violence is about, well, violence, although Cronenberg insists those familiar with his oeuvre may be surprised.

"It's not an action thriller, so it's not particularly violent, not gory at all," he insists. "But violence is its subject on a certain level."

Not surprisingly it's sex, and not violence, that has attracted the concern of the Motion Picture Association of America which has given Where the Truth Lies an NC-17 rating, an edict that can spell box-office poison in the U.S.

Montreal filmmaker Louise Archambault snagged the opening slot for the Canada First program with her debut feature Familia, an intricate and intimate relationship drama. And for the first time the festival will be offering micro-movies, experimental little shorts made by Canadians expressly for cellular phone viewing. Actor-filmmaker Don McKellar is also introducing mini-movies made not just for, but by, cellphone video technology.

The fest is also a much-embraced opportunity to stargaze. There will be parties galore. And with the festival centre close to the trendy Yorkville district, movie fans and paparazzi have found celebrities easily visible dining or shopping or, in the notorious case of Nick Nolte, staggering dangerously across a busy intersection.