As Noah Cowan put it on Thursday night, upon taking the stage to introduce the opening gala of the Toronto International Film Festival, ‘It is all happening again.’

The festival took off at Roy Thomson Hall as TIFF organizers gathered in the spotlight with the cast and crew of Fugitive Pieces, the Robert Lantos-produced and Jeremy Podeswa-directed adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Anne Michaels — which served as the starting gun to its 32nd edition of the landmark fete.

It was the tenth time that a picture with Lantos’ name attached has opened the festival, following recent pictures such as Being Julia, Ararat and, further back, In Praise of Older Women.

‘It is indeed my tenth time,’ Lantos told the crowd when it was his turn at the mic, ‘and I have three words to say about that. I like it.’

And yet he admitted that, at first, he did not want to make Fugitive Pieces, because the unconventional and highly poetic novel would be difficult to adapt to the big screen. Lantos thanked Podeswa and fellow producer Julia Rosenberg for ‘pestering’ him into the $9.5-million Canada/Greece copro.

He went on to confess that he had, once pestered, broken the most sacred rule of producing — ‘Thou shalt never invest thy own money in thy film’ — to make the picture. And for that, he joked, ‘I expect to be pilloried and exiled.’

Podeswa also has history with TIFF, going back to a short he screened in 1983 and, more recently, his features Eclipse and The Five Senses, and returned praise to Cowan and festival boss Piers Handling for putting on the ‘best curated, best run’ festival in the world.

Pieces, about one man’s recovery from the Holocaust, ‘demonstrates the best of what people are capable of… even in the most difficult circumstances,’ he said.

By the time the 10-member principal cast — little- and lesser-knowns including Stephen Dillane and Rade Serbedzija — was brought out on stage the speeches and introductions had, as usual, gone long, but the picture finally rolled after about 40 minutes, and was greeted with vigorous applause from the crowd at the end.

Fugitive Pieces screens again on Saturday and is expected in theaters via Lantos’ newly formed Maximum Films Distribution.