Up North, an Early Gauge of Oscar Race : Movies: Toronto festival, increasingly used as a launching pad for award winners, will screen 319 films in 10 days.

The Toronto Film Festival may not be as glitzy as, say, Sundance or Cannes, but in many respects, it’s just as important. Increasingly, Hollywood’s majors and mini-majors--the Miramaxes, the Fine Lines, the Fox Searchlights--use it to launch Oscar contenders (last year these included “Elizabeth,” “Hillary and Jackie” and the ubiquitous “Life Is Beautiful”). Orphaned imports and other independent films use it to find distribution.

Journalists use it to cover fall and holiday releases. A total of 319 films will be shown at Toronto--254 of them features, 65 of them shorts, 171 of them world or North American premieres, 86 of them by first-time filmmakers--at 18 cinemas that begin screenings as early as 8 a.m. and continue past midnight.

Beginning Thursday and concluding on Sept. 18, the festival will attract a quarter of a million attendees, as well as 700 journalists. It may not have scantily clad starlets, but it’s big, in fact one of the biggest public festivals in the world. It’s also noncompetitive, meaning no in-fighting among juries, no disgruntled filmmakers, no controversies. As festival director Piers Handling says proudly, it’s Canadian. This year’s entries are all over the map, which, according to Handling, is the point.

“We’ve always wanted to be a very inclusive festival,” he says. “The original founders wanted to touch on a number of bases, from a general moviegoing public who want to see a star-driven vehicle down to a coterie of hard-core cinephiles who are prepared to look at experimental work to everything in between.”

Opening the festival is, as always, a Canadian venture. This year it’s Atom Egoyan’s “Felicia’s Journey,” based on the novel by William Trevor, about a pregnant Irish girl (Elaine Cassidy) who is searching for the father of her child and runs afoul of a fastidious, middle-aged catering manager-serial killer (Bob Hoskins). Like Egoyan’s previous film, “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Felicia’s Journey” relates horrific events in a dreamy, nonlinear style. It also features an eyebrow raising performance by Hoskins.

Certainly high up the list of eagerly awaited studio projects is the world premiere of Wayne Wang’s “Anywhere But Here.” It stars Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman and is based on Mona Simpson’s celebrated novel about a wayward mother who drags her more conventionally minded teenage daughter from Wisconsin to Beverly Hills.

Venturing into uncharted territory once again is Taiwanese director Ang Lee, who, after forays to 19th century England (“Sense and Sensibility”) and 1970s New England (“The Ice Storm”), this time dramatizes 19th century Middle America in “Ride With the Devil,” about a group of Confederate irregulars (Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, James Caviezel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who make war--and peace--each in his own way. The film also features the acting debut of songstress Jewel.

Among the more potentially transgressive entries is Harmony Korine’s “Julien Donkey-Boy,” featuring Ewen Bremner (“Trainspotting”) as a disturbed young man who works with vision-impaired students and lives with his pregnant sister and abusive father. Korine, who wrote “Kids” and directed “Gummo,” used hand-held digital video cameras and shot without a script according to the principles of Dogma ‘95, a movement that eschews not only scripts, but Hollywood production values.

A few other titles to look out for:

* Former Sundance winner Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey,” starring Terence Stamp as an English ex-con who goes to L.A. to investigate the death of his daughter, who was involved with a shifty record executive (Peter Fonda).

* “Happy, Texas,” starring Steve Zahn and Jeremy Northam as a pair of escaped convicts who adopt gay identities as coordinators of children’s pageants in a small Texas town.

* Bill Forsyth’s “Gregory’s Two Girls,” the eagerly awaited follow-up to his charming “Gregory’s Girl,” in which the hero is now a schoolteacher caught between two girls.

* Alan Rudolph’s “Breakfast of Champions,” based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel and starring Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte, about a collision between a writer and small-town businessman whose life is falling apart.

* Mike Figgis’ “Miss Julie,” starring Saffron Burroughs and Peter Mullan, an update of the August Strindberg play about an aristocratic woman who is seduced by her father’s valet and has to live with the consequences.

* Gavin O’Connor’s “Tumbleweeds,” in which Tony award-winner Janet McTeer (“A Doll’s House”) plays a mother who drags her young daughter through a series of abusive relationships.

* Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog,” with Forest Whitaker as a professional killer who is betrayed by the Mafia family that employs him.

* Tim Roth’s “The War Zone,” a bleak tale of incest in a cold clime, which features veterans Ray Winstone (“Nil by Mouth”) and Tilda Swinton (“Orlando”) and newcomers Freddie Cunliffe and Lara Belmont.

* Scott Elliot’s “A Map of the World,” from the novel by Jane Hamilton and starring Sigourney Weaver, David Strathairn and Julianne Moore, about a tragedy that befalls two families in a small Wisconsin town.

* James Toback’s “Black and White,” described as “a provocative exploration of race, sex and hip-hop,” with Ben Stiller and Claudia Schiffer.

* Michael Winterbottom’s “Wonderland,” starring Enzo Cilenti and Ian Hart, about a British family looking for love.

* And director Gregg Araki orchestrating a kind of Gen X “Jules and Jim” in “Splendor,” starring Kathleen Robertson and Johnathon Schaech.

Last but not least are a whole slew of familiar names at the festival: Woody Allen weighs in with “Sweet and Lowdown,” featuring his usual all-star cast (this time including Sean Penn and Uma Thurman), in a period piece about a jazz guitarist and his life and loves; Robin Williams is on hand in Peter Kassovitz’s “Jakob the Liar,” about a Jewish cafe owner in Nazi-occupied Poland who risks his life inventing bogus radio news accounts of Allied advances to keep up the flagging spirits of his fellow ghetto occupants; Lawrence Kasdan’s “Mumford,” starring Loren Dean and Hope Davis, a comedy-drama about a psychiatrist who successfully sets up shop in a small town but has a few problems of his own; another small town is brought to life in Lasse Hallstrom’s “The Cider House Rules,” from the John Irving novel, starring Michael Caine, Charlize Theron, and this year’s unlikely festival It Boy, Tobey Maguire.

Finally, the festival concludes with “Onegin,” directed by Martha Fiennes and featuring her brother, Ralph, and Liv Tyler. It’s based on the Alexander Pushkin novel about a decadent aristocrat’s tortured love life. Special screenings in Moscow earlier this year resulted in Western observers criticizing the film’s anachronistic use of later-period music. The Russians didn’t seem to care.