Disgrace, Miracle at St. Anna to premiere at Toronto film fest

The Toronto International Film Festival has announced that  Disgrace, a film adapted from the book by J.M. Coetzee, and Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna will have their world premieres in September at the 2008 event.

Also, Canadian Michael Cera will star in a new romantic comedy helmed by Peter Sollett, one of six special presentations announced Wednesday by the festival.

Disgrace, directed by Steve Jacobs and filmed in Australia and South Africa, stars John Malkovich as a South African professor forced to resign after an affair with one of his students. He goes to live on his daughter's farm where their relationship is tested when they become victims of a vicious attack.

Nobel Prize-winning author Coetzee wrote the book, which explores the violence and sense of dislocation of contemporary South Africa.

Lee's Miracle at St. Anna is the story of four black U.S. soldiers, part of the "Buffalo Soldier" division stationed in Tuscany during the Second World War. The screenplay was written by James McBride, who wrote a book of the same name.

Cera stars in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, also making its world premiere at the Toronto festival. He plays an indie music lover with a broken heart who sets out to find a secret concert by a legendary band in the company of a young woman he's just met.

Other films announced Thursday:

• Good, a British-German co-production directed by Vicente Amorim. Viggo Mortensen plays a literature professor in the 1930s who writes a book advocating compassionate euthanasia that attracts the attention of powerful political figures.
• Il Divo, an Italian-French co-production directed by Paolo Sorrentino, about Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, a high-profile politician suspected of involvement with the Mafia. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2008.
• The Hurt Locker, a U.S. film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, about an elite army bomb squad operating in Iraq.

The opening film at the Toronto film festival, previously announced, will be the Canadian film Passchendaele. The event runs Sept. 4 to 13.