Canadian Film Festival: Full Stream Ahead for the Third Year
By Liam Lacey
Earlier this year, my colleague Jim Slotek — writing about the online success of the 2019 historical drama, Brotherhood — proffered a theory that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Canadian audiences are enthusiastic to see homegrown films, just not in theatres.
A Small Fortune
The theory is based on the bump in clicks we get on this site when Canadian films go to streaming services compared to when they’re first released theatrically, typically poorly marketed and with short runs.
If he’s right, it could mean a bright future for events such as Toronto-based Canadian Film Festival, running March 22 to April 2. The CFF, which features indie Canadian films, was one of the first festivals to go online in March 2020 shortly after the pandemic hit, by partnering with the premium cable and satellite channel, Super Channel.
This year marks the third iteration of the online and television festival, and it’s a great chance for an immersion into contemporary Canadian indie filmmaking, with 10 features and 28 shorts spread over a comfortable two-week stretch.
Two conditions apply: You have to watch the films when they’re on television (9 pm, Tuesday to Saturday, for each of the features) and you need a subscription to Super Channel Fuse, which can be bought through your cable provider, Amazon Prime or Apple TV+ for a base rate $9.95 a month.
For other festival events, including the Action on Women in Film Day (March 23), MasterClasses and industry panels, check out the www.canadianfilmfest.ca home page.
Here’s a guide to the features available over the next two weeks.
March 22
Tehranto
Directed by Faran Moradi
Tehranto is the name for the Iranian immigrant community in North York and Richmond Hill, the setting for this rom-com between Canadian-born Sharon (Mo Zeghami) and Iran-born Badi (Sammy Azero) who meet cute and share a common heritage. The impediment here is that she’s from a well-off Richmond Hill family who left before the 1979 revolution, and whose family are determined to assimilate and are pushing her into a career in real estate. He’s a medical student from a poor Bahai family who escaped after the revolution, who feels alienated from Canadian society. Within the generally frothy commercial framework, including a jocular Amelie-style narrator, writer/director Moradi’s film looks at fracture lines of mixed identities and the psychological cost of immigration.
March 23
The Noise of Motors (Le bruit de moteurs)
Directed by Phillipe Gregoire
Following well-received festival slots in San Sebastian and Torino, Grégoire emerges as a new Quebec director to watch with his absurdist debut feature. It follows a young firearms instructor, Alexandre (Robert Naylor) at a border guard training centre, who finds himself unjustly suspended for his sexual indiscretions. Alexandre is sent back home to his hometown in Napierville, Quebec, where his mother owns the local drag racing track. Once there, he finds himself dogged by two local cops, who keep discovering caches of sexually explicit drawings featuring his likeness, though he finds some consolation through the friendship of an eccentric Icelandic tourist and drag racer (Tanya Bjork). Shot and edited with formal care, Gregoire’s filmmaking evokes the deadpan humour of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
March 24
We’re All In This Together
Directed by Katie Boland
Adapted from Canadian writer Amy Jones’ 2016 comic novel, this chaotic family tale stars writer-director Boland as Finn Parker, a proverbial hot mess, who returns from self-exile in Toronto to her Thunder Bay hometown after her mother, Kate (Martha Burns) goes over the Kakabeka Falls in a whisky barrel, an event which goes viral. Kate, who has dementia, is left temporarily in a coma. There’s a lot of abrupt transitions and subplots involving a younger teen sister, Paris (Alisha Newton), an ex-boyfriend (Adam Butcher), and the apparently fatherless young son (Max Winter) of Finn’s twin sister, Nicki, also played by Boland. Most notably, the film features a triumph of stunt-casting. Much of the drama involves the fraught relationship between Finn and Nicki. How two Bolands have caustic arguments before the camera with another one behind it is why they call the movies magic.
March 25
A Small Fortune
Directed by Adam Perry
This noir drama, set on Prince Edward Island, finds Kevin (Stephen Oates) working in the dying trade, using a horse and rake to collect Irish Moss, a seaweed used in food and agricultural products. Married to Sam (Liane Baliban) and with a baby on the way, he’s tight for cash. When Kevin finds a bag of money washed up on the beach, he makes the fateful decision to keep it. The owners of the cash come looking for it, and things turn grim. See Jennie Punter’s review.
Carmen
March 26
Ashgrove
Directed by Jeremy LaLonde
A hybrid of low-budget science fiction and marital breakdown drama, Ashgrove stars Amanda Brugel as research scientist Dr. Jennifer Ashgrove, working to stop a water-based virus that is predicted to end all human life in a few years. When she faints with exhaustion, her supervisor and a consulting neurologist order her to take a weekend off with her slacker writer husband (Jonas Chernik), who keeps making unexpected phone calls and micro-managing the weekend. Old wounds and new suspicions pop up, especially at a dinner with another couple, Elliott (Shawn Doyle) and Sammy (Natalie Brown). Ashgrove, which was written by director Lalonde along with leads Brugel and Chernik, works best when it focuses on a couple facing the end of their marriage and the end of the world, though the script doesn’t really prepare us the film’s third-act narrative jujitsu.
March 29
The Long Rider
Directed by Sean Cisterna
Filipe Leite is a Brazilian-born Canadian who — inspired by Swiss-born Argentinian writer Aime Tschiffely’s account of his 1925 horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York — decided to ride from Calgary to his parent’s hometown in Brazil on horseback, an endeavour of 16,000 kilometres and more than two years’ duration. We follow Leite on his journey (mostly through his own smartphone videos) from his bon voyage at the 2012 Calgary Stampede, as he travels to Montana, bonds with his horses through Midwestern drought, dangerous Mexican drug-trafficking areas, loneliness, scary highway traffic and intransigent border authorities. As quixotic as this retro-endurance sport sounds, the film also features interviews with CuChullaine O’Reilly, founder of the Long Riders Guild, an international organization of equestrian explorers, hoofing it across vast distances around the world.
March 30
Tenzin
Directed by Michael LeBlanc and Josh Reichmann
Tenzin, a young Tibetan man in Toronto, suffers from a combination of grief and anger when everyone in his community compares him unfavourably to his older brother, a protestor who immolated himself to protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Tenzin works as an assistant to a fellow Tibetan, a tow-truck operator for hire who is regularly bullied and exploited by his boss, leading to a culminating confrontation. Moving between dreams, stories, and wintry scenes around Little Tibet in Parkdale, the 73-minute film is more reverie than conventional narrative.
March 31
Beneath the Surface
Directed by Marie-Geneviève Chabot
A staged documentary, Beneath the Surface puts the three Sirois brothers and their estranged father, Laurent, together on a fishing trip. Laurent left the children when the oldest was five-years-old and while the immediate goal is catching bass, the brothers are also fishing for explanations. There are lots of tough questions, testy answers, hurt feelings and discussions of paternal responsibility and mental illness in this ruminative short feature. Throughout, the men keep hauling bass out of the water, sharing new experiences to partly patch over the wounds from the past.
April 1
The Last Mark
Directed by Reem Morsi
Keele (Shawn Doyle), a middle-aged hitman on the verge of retirement, decides for his own mysterious motives not to kill a call-girl witness to a murder. He instead takes her as his hostage. In an effort to elude his psychopathic partner, Palmer (Bryce Hodgson), Keele contacts a fixer (Jonas Chernick) to help he and his hostage to leave the country. Most of the action takes place in a safe house where Keele is holed up with Peyton, and there a few kinks in the plan. Though generic, The Last Mark is distinguished by its sardonic humour, especially from Hodgson as a bad guy who really enjoys his dirty work.
April 2
Carmen
Directed by Valerie Buhagiar
Toronto actor-director Valerie Buhagiar’s Carmen, the festival’s closing feature, is a light, unabashed crowd-pleaser, set in the writer-director’s birthplace on the beautiful Mediterranean island nation of Malta. English actress Natasha McElhone (Solaris, Designated Survivor) plays Carmen, the middle-aged unmarried sister of a village priest who, according to local tradition, is obliged to also be his housekeeper. When the priest suddenly dies, Carmen is without job or home. While hiding out in the church’s confession box one day, she finds herself mistaken for the new priest, and hears a woman’s confession. The experience awakens a new sense of power to change both the community and her own life. Though the character has no other connection to Georges Bizet’s 19th century opera, Carmen does trade in her black mourning clothes for a fire-engine red ensemble to signal her re-awakened passion for life.