There is something wonderfully diverse about the Toronto International Film Festival. On the first day, without even really looking through the 448 page catalog, I moved through a strange world of differences.

Cloud 9

Andreas Dresen’s touching Cloud 9, a German film about an 60-something woman leaving her husband of 30 years for a 76-year gentleman, with plenty of graphic senior sex action to prove it. Astra Taylor’s thinking-person's documentary Examined Life, a tour through the contemporary landscape of philosophy. Intellectual luminaries such as Animal Liberation author Peter Singer, gender theorist Judith Butler, African-American literary superstar Cornel West, disability advocate Sunura Taylor ––among others––make for heady and strangely exciting viewing. Perhaps philosophy will be the new action film. For a film that mixes action and philosophy, there’s was Phawat Panangkasiri’s In the Shadow of the Naga, a Thai Buddhist/crime film that involves three bank robbers who pretend to be Buddhist monks to find the money that one of them supposedly buried under the temple. While there is plenty of gun fire, there is also careful consideration of Buddhist principles, including a sincere apology at the film’s front that not all characters in the film acted in accord with the tenets of Buddhism. And finally Gabriel Medina’s The Paranoids, a sad-sack, anxiety-ridden performer from Buenos Aires who dresses up in monster outfit to make money to fund his screenplay that he has yet to write a word of. But all of his nervous behavior seems to be justified when he discovers an old friend has turned him (using his actual name) into a comic character in a Spanish sitcom.

Last night, the opening night film, Paul Gross' Passchendaele, was an epic war film about the eponymous World War I battle. As in other years, this first slot went to a Canadian film. Tomorrow night, Focus Features' Burn After Reading, which is already gaining huge attention, will screen.

To start off festival coverage, here are some simple facts:

Number of films being screened: 312

Countries represented: 64

Minutes of film: 20,693

Shortest films: three minutes ("Dig," "Flash in the Metropolitan," "Lossless 2" and "Trypps 5")

Number of movies starring John Malkovich: three ("Burn After Reading," "Disgrace," "Afterwards")