Toronto Film Festival puts special focus on South African works

By Colin McClelland
The Associated Press

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Annette Bening and Shaun Evans star in Istvan Szabo's "Being Julia." The production will open the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 9.

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TORONTO — The 29th annual Toronto International Film Festival will spotlight South African productions during its two-week run Sept. 9-18, festival co-director Noah Cowan announced.

The festival is hoping to schedule more than 300 films from 50 countries on 21 screens. The full listing won't be finalized until late August, organizers said.

A special festival category, South Africa: 10 Years Later, will focus on films from the country which held its first free elections in 1994 after the collapse of apartheid. And a gala event will present the world premiere of "Red Dust," a thriller set in South Africa's post-apartheid society.

"There's an exceptional crop of new films from there," said Cowan.

Those include "Yesterday," by South African Darrell James Roodt, the first feature film shot in the Zulu language. It profiles a mother's courage facing the stigma of AIDS in a traditional society.

Also booked is "Hotel Rwanda," by Terry George, a look at the southern Africa country on the eve of genocide a decade ago when the members of the Hutu tribe began slaughtering their countrymen Tutsis.

"Red Dust" stars Oscar-winner Hillary Swank as a visiting lawyer hired to find a missing man during hearings for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission investigated atrocities during apartheid and granted amnesty to those who confessed their participation.

The world premiere of Istvan Szabo's "Being Julia," starring Jeremy Irons and Annette Bening, will open the festival Sept. 9. From the Somerset Maugham novel "Theatre," Bening plays a star stage actress in London's West End seeking revenge on a manipulative lover.

The Toronto event bills itself as the "world's premier festival of international discovery."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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