The most sought-after launching point for Canadian movies is again proving to be a diverse draw, as the Toronto International Film Festival revealed on July 18 a lineup of homegrowns stocked with zombies, an Inuit shaman and the Rwandan genocide.

The names of filmmakers included in the 31st TIFF include Sarah Polley, whose feature directorial debut Away From Her will make its world premiere as a gala presentation.

‘It is tremendous to see someone like Sarah, who has been an actress on screen, come here with her short films, and now she has moved into directing her first feature,’ said TIFF chief Piers Handling at the press conference.

The film stars Gordon Pinsent and Oscar-winner Julie Christie, and is an adaptation of the Alice Munro short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, about an elderly couple dealing with Alzheimer’s.

Polley says that support from TIFF is ‘a big reason I had the confidence to keep trying and ultimately make a feature. We’re all so unbelievably honored. This is a lot more than we could have hoped for when we were making the film.’

Also on the list, Guy Maddin returns – as part of the Special Presentations program – with The Brand Upon the Brain!, an autobiographical and silent film shot in Super 8. Maddin has described the film as a companion piece to his 2003 film Cowards Bend the Knee.

The picture is ‘a crazed fantasia involving orphans, lighthouses and enterprising teen detectives,’ according to TIFF programmer Steve Gravestock, and will be screened with a narrator, two Foley artists and a vocalist.’

But lest things get too serious, the new-talent Canada First! program will open with a zombie movie. Fido is director/cowriter Andrew Currie’s horror-comedy, in which corpses rise from the dead after the planet is soaked in space dust. Carrie-Ann Moss, Billy Connolly and Henry Czerny star.

Fido ‘is very lively and very smartly done,’ says Gravestock, ‘It’s a crowd-pleaser, so we thought it would work well as the opening film. It was an easy decision in a lot of ways.’

Currie appeared on stage flanked by someone in a zombie costume. ‘I made Fido for people who love films, so for me it feels very appropriate and special that it world premieres at Toronto, a festival world famous for film lovers,’ he said.

From Quebec, Catherine Martin brings her Dans les villes, a Visions presentation about the lives of four disparate souls, while Philippe Falardeau’s Congorama will have its North American premiere as a special presentation. The film, which closed the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, is about the unusual friendship that forms between a Quebec man and a Belgian.

Patrice Sauvé’s Cheech, based on the popular local stage play, will also play Canada First!, along with Carolyn Combs’ Acts of Imagination, Jean Châteauvert’s La Coupure, Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line, Paul Fox’s Everything’s Gone Green, Mazdak Taebi’s Mercy, Camelia Frieberg’s A Stone’s Throw, and Noël Mitrani’s Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi.

Robert Favreau’s film about romance amid the Rwandan genocide, Un dimanche à Kigali, will follow its $1 million-plus performance at the Quebec box office with a Toronto debut in Contemporary World Cinema. Docmaker Allan King will mark his half-century in the business with the premiere of EMPz 4 LIFE in the Masters program.

TIFF programmers are also presenting a look back at Canadian film history. The Canadian Retrospective will fete innovator Peter Mettler, a tribute that will coincide with the launch of University of Alberta professor Jerry White’s book, Of This Place and Elsewhere: The Films and Photography of Peter Mettler.

There will also be a Special Presentation showcasing the most provocative work by late animator Norman McLaren, the filmmaker behind such landmarks as the Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952). The Canadian Open Vault will feature Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero (1973), the comic tragedy about a man who’s committed to living life like he is in the Wild West, starring Keir Dullea, John Beck and Elizabeth Ashley.

TIFF runs Sept. 7-16 and will open with the previously announced The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the story of the last great Inuit shaman and his family. *

-With files from Dustin Dinoff