Fred Schepisi's Last Orders will makes its world premiere at the 26th Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 6-15. Based on UK novelist Graham Swift's Booker Prize-winner and starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Ray Winstone, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay, the film is being sold internationally by Winchester Films.

Toronto Festival Director Piers Handling announced one international premiere, the wartime drama Dark Blue World from Kolya director Jan Sverak, and a raft of North American premieres including Scott Hick's Hearts In Atlantis, starring Anthony Hopkins; Danis Tanovic's Bosnian conflict drama, No Man's Land; Ken Loach's ode to railroad workers, The Navigators; Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day; Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse; Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under A Red Bridge and Manoel de Oliveira' s Je Rentre A La Maison. Also making its North American bow, Lone Scherfig's Berlin Silver Bear-winner, Italian For Beginners, will front the festival's national cinema programme which focuses this year on the Nordic region.

The festival announced two new programmes, Wavelengths, devoted to avant-garde filmmaking featuring works by artists such as Robert Breer, Matthias Müller, Nathaniel and Stan Brakhage; and Canadian Retrospective, which will celebrate the work of local heroes. The subject of the inaugural programme is Quebecois filmmaker Jean Pierre Lefebvre. Other historical facets of the festival include a screening of F.W. Murnau's 1921 silent horror film Nosferatu with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra providing live accompaniment of the original score.

The festival also announced a revamped web presence that will expedite ticket sales and schedule information while providing greater breadth in content, including live and retrospective festival coverage and Festival Flashback, an archive of the festival's 26-year history. The service will also issue festival alerts to patrons via wireless devices. According to a release, Toronto's web site attracted 15m hits in 2000 versus 600,000 hits when the service was launched in 1995.