Get your rest, stock up on eye drops, throat lozenges, PowerBars and Java beans, get out your celebrity-gawking glasses and put on your best schmooze face – TIFF is coming.

The 29th annual Toronto International Film Festival, which announced its final lineup Aug. 24, gets underway for 10 days starting Sept. 9 with opening-night gala Being Julia, starring Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons and produced by Robert Lantos.

The biggest change this year sees the end of Perspective Canada, the Canuck showcase for the past 20 years. Instead, features from veteran local directors will play in the international Gala, Special Presentations, Contemporary World Cinema, Visions and Real to Reel (documentary) programs. Meanwhile, Canadian features from rookie directors, or those making their TIFF debut, will be screened as part of Canada First!, opening this year with Michael McGowan’s comedy-drama Saint Ralph. Thirty-eight Canuck shorts will be shown in the new Short Cuts Canada sidebar.

‘There are a couple of generations [of filmmakers] that have already gone through our doors, and we thought it was appropriate for them to be seen in an international context,’ TIFF programmer Stacey Donen said at a recent press conference. ‘Everyone seems to be very supportive about their films playing in those [international] sections.’

TIFF’s other global programs include Masters, which features new releases from acclaimed directors. This year’s bumper crop includes Spike Lee’s Sucker Free City; Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education; the omnibus film Eros from Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and 91-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni; Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty; Volker Schlondorff’s The Ninth Day; and Theo Angelopoulos’ Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.

The Wavelengths program presents experimental films and videos and their makers, while Midnight Madness offers off-the-wall flicks for the witching hour.

The festival takes advantage of its many high-profile guests with Dialogues, which features filmmakers each presenting an all-time favorite film. Highlights will include Schlondorff introducing the 1957 classic Sweet Smell of Success and legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond bringing a restored print of Heaven’s Gate. That notorious film is also the subject of the Real to Reel doc Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate from U.S. director Michael Epstein.

Local filmmaker Don McKellar, promoting his feature Childstar, will present Toronto director David Cronenberg’s 1979 shocker The Brood.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid, the fest has made South Africa the focus of TIFF 2004’s national cinema program, titled South Africa: Ten Years Later. The showcase includes the North American preem of novelist/filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade, about an African woman who tries to protect her daughter from the ritual of female circumcision.

While filmgoers are feasting on a menu of 328 films (253 of which are features) from 61 countries, the industry will be doing business aplenty. Most guests accompanying a film to Toronto are looking to check off sales to various territories. Distributors are looking to make acquisitions, with a particular appetite for documentary films this year in the wake of the record-breaking box office of Michael Moore’s films. TIFF is doing its part to help facilitate business by doubling its media and industry screenings, which have been known to turn people away and once sent Chicago critic Roger Ebert into a tizzy.

To help accommodate this expansion, TIFF has added Famous Players Paramount Theatre and Ryerson Theatre to the so-called Festival Village. Returning venues include Roy Thomson Hall (Galas), Elgin Theatre (Special Presentations), Cineplex Odeon/Galaxy Cinemas, Cumberland Cinemas, Art Gallery of Ontario, Isabel Bader Theatre, Royal Ontario Museum and National Film Board Mediatheque.

The OMDC Sales Office will be open again at the Sutton Place Hotel to facilitate meetings among producers, distributors, directors, buyers and sellers. TIFF reports that 650 companies have registered so far, including 37 new international participants.

In addition to the usual slate of press conferences and industry sessions, TIFF 2004 sees the launch of Talent Lab Toronto, in which 21 preselected Canadian filmmakers will benefit from some time with visiting talent, including Kevin Spacey (in town with Beyond the Sea), Guy Maddin and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

The festival ends on Sept. 18 with the screening of the Martin Short comedy Jiminy Glick in Lalawood.

Screening times and ticket and industry info are available on the TIFF website.

-www.e.bell/filmfest