TIFF spotlights Istanbul

TIFF turned up the glitz and the gore Tuesday with Special Presentations and Midnight Madness titles that included a final night Roy Thomson Hall slot for the Keira Knightley and Eva Mendes-starrer Last Night from director Massy Tadjedin and Miramax.

The fest rounded out its 2010 gala offerings by booking French director Gilles Paquet Brenner’s Sarah’s Key into Roy Thomson Hall with his Kristin Scott Thomas-starrer about an American journalist having to make big decisions on her marriage and an unborn child.

TIFF also named Istanbul as the subject of this year’s city-to-city spotlight, complete with ten Turkish films and a mini-symposium on the European-Middle East gateway city.

And Toronto unveiled another 18 Special Presentations for this year’s line-up, including 14 world premieres bullet-proofed with stars.

These include Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, the James Franco-starring mountain drama and a follow-up to Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire that took TIFF by storm in 2008 on its way to Oscar triumph.

Other Special Presentations bookings: a world bow for Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, starring Matt Damon and Cecile De France, John Sayle’s Amigo, and Dustin Lance Black’s feature debut What’s Wrong With Virginia, starring Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris.

There’s also North American bows for plum European titles, including Italian director Stefano Incerti’s Gorbaciòf – The Cashier who Liked Gambling, Álex de la Iglesia’s The Last Circus and French director Benoit Jacquot’s Deep in the Woods.

Comedy king Will Ferrell is also Toronto-bound with the off-beat dramedy Everything Must Go, from Dan Rush, as is Matt Reeves’ Let Me In, which Kick Ass-star Chloe Moretz plays a next door neighbour to a social outcast, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Toronto also booked Special Presentations slots for Mothers, Milcho Manchevski’s Macedonia/France/Bulgaria co-pro, and The Poll Diaries, by Chris Kraus, this time a Germany/Austria/Estonia co-production.

Now to the gore-and-guts Midnight Madness sidebar, where programmer Colin Geddes booked films about a superheros and samurai fighters, gun runners and vampire hunters for this year’s line-up.

Geddes booked Brad Anderson’s The Vanishing on 7th Street, a chiller about the end of the world after a massive power outage that stars Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo, and Guy Moshe’s action noir movie Bunraku, top-lined by Josh Hartnett as a young samurai, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson as a bartender.

There’s also Insidious, from Saw creator James Wan, the Hong Kong films The Butcher, The Chef and the Swordsman, by Wu Ershan, and Dante Lam’s Fire of Conscience, billed as robbers and gunrunners battling cops amid an orchestra of exploding grenades and machine gun rounds.

In a year without apparent Japanese wackiness, Geddes also booked the Hong Kong/China/France co-pro Red Nights, a feature debut from Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud, and Stake Land, Jim Mickle’s vision of post-apocalyptic America, complete with bloodsuckers and fundamentalist militia fighters.

Geddes also hand-picked James Gunn’s Super, starring Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon, and The Ward, a long-awaited thriller from John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) that stars Amber Heard as a young woman in a 1960s mental institution terrorized by unseen forces.

TIFF also unwrapped its industry program, which includes two new sections: Moguls, or one-on-one sessions with veteran producers Christine Vachon and Bob Berney, and the Focus On series on industry trends.

These include panels on 3D film, synergies between film and video gaming, international co-productions and a case study on The Bang Bang Club, a copro produced in part by Daniel Irons.

TIFF is also returning to film 101 panels on film funding, marketing, the Internet and VOD, and even a panel entitled Talk To My Agent, where filmmakers engage with veteran agents.