Love is more than just a word, more than a feeling. It's now the title of a seven-part, $2 million movie that promises to bring to Toronto this fall the most exciting, talented group of women ever assembled for a Canadian showbiz endeavor.

They are singer Joni Mitchell, actress Liv Ullmann, acclaimed writer-historian Antonia Fraser, novelist-playwright Edna O'Brien, film critic Penelope Gilliat, restaurant critic-novelist Gael Green, director Mai Zetterling, and screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who turned out the tough-minded Slap Shot hockey movie starring Paul Newman. Each of them have been commissioned to write one of the movie's various unrelated chapters all about love, but not exclusively from a woman's point of view. Mitchell, Dowd and Zetterling are to direct the ones they have written and Mitchell and Ullman have agreed to star in the sections they've authored.

The project is a first production for Renee Perlmutter, wife of Quadrant Films president David Perlmutter. "This," she says, "is not a sister piece, not women's lib, but rather, a more general attempt to show various aspects of love." Shooting is scheduled to start in Toronto in October. At least one Canadian director, most likely a woman whom Renee Perlmutter declines to name at this point, will be involved, along with a number of Canadian actors, "none of them stars."