Festival attendee Rachel McAdams.

Festival Flash: Stars and Celebs


If the crowds of people, all wielding cameras and markers, that assembled in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in September of last year were any indication, the Toronto International Film Festival can sometimes be about the star power that assembles in our city rather than the wonderful cinema on our screens.

So because you've all submitted your picks for the festival by now, today's Festival Flash will forget about film and take a quick look at who the paparazzi will be stalking in Toronto at this year's festival.

We've already talked about some of the big names out of the over-500 celebrities going to attending the festival this year: heartthrobs Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Terrence Howard will all be assembling to make the hearts of Toronto girls go aflutter, while many renown and respected filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Julie Taymor, Richard Attenborough, Ang Lee and Paul Haggis will also be making an appearance.

Woody Allen will be making his first appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is extremely exciting for Allen fans like me, and Bollywood enthusiasts will be excited to know that juggernaut actor Amitabh Bachchan will be attending, as well as Seema Biswas, Rahul Bose and Nandita Das.

And since I don't want it to seem like I made this post just to put up a photo of Rachel McAdams on the blog, McAdams will be joining other Canadian stars such as Ryan Gosling, Mira Nair, David Cronenberg, and one of my favorite actresses, Ellen Page, at TIFF. And if Page and McAdams isn't enough to appease the boys, you can also expect to catch glimpses of Keira Knightley, Evan Rachel Wood, Koel Purie, Bing Bing Fan, Monica Bellucci, and my personal celebrity crush Naomi Watts.

If you're looking to find a good place to stake out to grab a photo of people like Clive Owen, Cate Blanchett, Don Cheadle, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, and any of the other over 500 celebs at the festival, I'd highly suggest hanging around places like the InterContinental, Sutton Place, Lobby, Bistro 990, and pretty much any place in Yorkville.

If you happen to catch any great celeb photos or have any great celeb stories to tell, upload them to the blogTO Flickr pool and add them to the comments of the festival coverage on blogTO over the next few weeks.

(Image: Festival attendee Rachel McAdams.)


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