With Jim Carrey, Mike Myers and Seth Rogen dominating the Hollywood box office, the Toronto International Film Festival has decided to embrace the Canadian comedy, eh?

As part of the Canadian program, the festival booked Sook-Yin Lee’s offbeat sexual comedy Year of the Carnivore to open the Canada First! showcase, while the Contemporary World Cinema program is to include world bows for Bruce Sweeney’s romantic comedy Excited, Robert Stefaniuk’s vampire yukker Suck and Gary Yates’ crime laugher High Life.

Year of the Carnivore coproducer Trish Dolman said the feature directorial debut by Lee, coproduced by Screen Siren Pictures and The Film Farm, was a ‘homage to clumsy young lovers.’

The CWC sidebar will also give a Canadian premiere to Matthew Bissonnette’s low-key comedy drama Passenger Side, a road movie about two brothers touring southern California that bowed at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Toronto fest also booked Peter Stebbings’ Defendor, a superhero flick that stars Woody Harrelson and Sandra Oh, for a world bow.

Elsewhere, Dilip Mehta will bring Cooking with Stella, a satire he co-wrote with sister Deepa Mehta, to Roy Thomson Hall for its world premiere.

Besides the populist crowd-pleasers, TIFF also booked art-house dramas for its 34th run, including Roy Thomson slots for Atom Egoyan’s Chloe and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a Canada/U.K. coproduction.

Further, Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time will unspool as part of the special presentations program, alongside Jacob Tierney’s The Trotsky and Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère.

Festival organizers unveiled 70 titles in all in the Canadian program, with the bulk, 41, found in Short Cuts Canada.

The schedule is book-ended by British period dramas – with Jean-Marc Vallée’s Young Victoria to close Toronto after Jon Amiel’s Creation opens the festival on Sept. 10.

Young Victoria, which has been picked up for theatrical release here by Alliance Films, is the first film from Vallée after the success of his 2006 Quebecois coming-of-age drama C.R.A.Z.Y.

Of the 804 submissions Toronto received this year – 200 features and 604 shorts – only three Canadian features have so far made it to Roy Thomson Hall for gala slots, while five have landed in the high-profile Special Presentations sidebar.

Festival co-director Cameron Bailey had to defend his decision to overlook a Canadian film for opening night. He reiterated that he and festival co-director Piers Handling ‘fell in love’ with Creation and will work hard to ensure Canadian films that screen at TIFF find an audience during and after the festival.

Handling called this year’s Canadian film lineup ‘extensive and exciting,’ while Steve Gravestock, TIFF’s associate director of Canadian programming, said the Canuck contingent in Toronto this year was balanced between emerging talent and returning veterans like Guy Maddin, Chris Landreth, John Greyson and Min Sook Lee, who are bringing their latest shorts.

Toronto also booked four Canadian documentaries: Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, a portrait of the enigmatic pianist by Peter Raymont and Michele Hozer; Peter Mettler’s Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands; and two Hollywood-themed films, Neil Diamond’s Reel Injun and Brigitte Berman’s Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.

TIFF will make additional film lineup announcements in the coming weeks ahead of its Sept. 10-19 run.