Canadian Film Fest: Diversity Abounds Amid Lots and Lots (and Lots) to See

By Liam Lacey

The Canadian Film Fest, running March 28 to April 1, has emerged in the last couple of years as an event where people across the country can get acquainted with the contemporary Canadian indie film scene.

Though the five days of screenings and industry-related events take place at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre, the films are also available on the cable provider Super Channel for a national audience.

Babysitter

Many of these films — which include nine features, 25 shorts, and one six-part TV series — are first or sophomore efforts, dramatizing such topical issues #MeToo, LGBTQ youth, immigration, generational tensions, and the effects of social media. But there’s one maple-flavoured zombie feature and even a couple of comedies, starting with the opening night feature.

Babysitter, March 28, 7 pm.

Babysitter, which played in the midnight sidebar at Sundance earlier this year, is manically stylish, full of candy colours, extreme closeups, and zooms. The second feature from actor-director Monia Chokri is a sex farce that mocks both misogyny and self-righteous gender sensitivity.

Dopey protagonist Cédric (Patrick Hivon) gets drunk at a bar one night watching a UFC fight and, after the match, forces a kiss on the cheek of a woman TV reporter. The unwanted smooch creates a scandal on social media, which leads him to being suspended from his job, in part because of a scathing article by his activist brother, Jean-Michel (Steve Laplante).

Cédric’s wife Nadine (played by director Chokri) is too deep in postpartum depression to care, but when she pretends to go back to work, Cedric decides to use his unemployment time to cowrite a book with his brother, consisting of letters of apology to women on behalf of men. To give himself more free time from domestic chores, he hires babysitter Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), an uninhibited sexpot who has a knack for intuiting everyone’s hangups and kinks, including mansplaining dude “feminists” with savior complexes.

Streams Flow from a River, March 28, 9 pm.

All six episodes of Christopher Yip’s Super Channel TV series have a total running time of 82 minutes, which means this series could also be a standalone feature. The series follows the Chow family, Chinese Canadian immigrants operating a combination laundry and liquor business in small-town Alberta. The series begins as second-generation Henry (Liam Ma), who is gay, and his sister, Loretta (Danielle Ayow) reluctantly return to their hometown when the father, Gordon (Simon Sinn) has a stroke and is being tended by their anxious mother, Diana (Jane Luk). The series shifts between the present — as Henry and Loretta revisit old pains — and in the past, we follow Gordon and Diana from their first date through the course of their disintegrating marriage.

When Time Got Louder, March 29, 7 pm.

Vancouver director Connie Cocchia used elements of her own life in this drama about a sister’s bond with her younger brother who has autism. The film begins as mother and father are interviewed by a social worker when their autistic teenaged son, Kaden (Jonathan Simao) is beaten by bullies on a city bus. Kaden’s close sibling Abbie (Willow Shields) returns from art school in California, where she has been exploring her new life, including a relationship with another girl, Karly (Ava Capri). The film opens in theatres March 31.

Bystanders, March 29, 9 pm.

In one of those “weekend at the cabin where all secrets are spilled” situations, this film by Nova Scotia director Koumbie follows a group of six former childhood friends, now men and women, as they discover one of the group, Justin, is under investigation for sexually assaulting his girlfriend. Each of the characters responds to the alleged transgressor according to their personal experiences, from the compassionate to the vengeful, and begin to fit pieces together from the past.

How To Get My Parents to Divorce, March 30, 7 pm.

Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers’ serio-comedy (a.k.a. Pas d’chicane dans ma cabane) focusing on middle-school adolescents is essentially The Parent Trap in reverse: Instead of a kid scheming to bring their estranged parents together, Justine (Charlotte St-Martin) is desperate to get her bickering lawyer parents to divorce. Frustrated in pursuing legal channels, she plots with four of her friends to stage a mock trial as an end-of-school project in front of the community to prove that her parents should split up. Like The Parent Trap, the film shows how children rarely have a say in the big decisions that shape their lives.

Golden Delicious, March 30, 9 pm.

Jason Karman’s coming-of-age and coming-out drama shares some plot points with Streams Flow From a River, another story centred on a Chinese-Canadian gay son, Jake (Cardi Wong) and an older sister, and over-worked parents whose marriage is collapsing, As well, Jake — a high school senior in East Vancouver — has a teenaged girlfriend who wants sex, college applications to complete, a dad who wants him to play on the high school basketball team, and embarrassing social media posts. Luckily, there’s also the cute dude shooting hoops in the alley behind Jake’s house, who teaches him to practice basketball by shooting with the other hand.

Bloom (Jouvencelles), March 31, 7 pm.

The dangers of social media runs as a thread through several films in this year’s festival. But it’s the central subject of the one documentary feature in the festival, Bloom (Jouvencelles). Fanie Pelletier’s non-judgmental film follows three groups of teenaged girls in their daily lives as they interact with strangers on chat sites, offer their takes on self-objectifying, gender classifications, mental health crises and the ways that the likes and dislikes online make them feel validated or rejected.

Retrograde, March 31, 9 pm.

Director Adrian Murray’s clever minimalist dramedy follows Molly (Molly Reisman), who we first meet as she is receiving a traffic ticket for pulling in front of a police car on the 401. Convinced that this must be an error, she pursues her grievance through every dead-end legal channel with a sense of victimhood to rival Seinfeld’s George Costanza, risking losing her job and alienating her housemates. Shot with long takes, this funny film is a painful spectacle of someone convinced that her willpower can change reality.

Polarized, April 1, 7 pm.

A rural romance film shot in Manitoba, Polarized follows aspiring songwriter Lisa (Holly Deveaux), who takes a job with a local agricultural company, owned by Palestinian immigrants, after her family’s farm is foreclosed by the bank. After a conflict with her young woman boss, Dalia (Maxine Denis) is fired but not for long. The two women are inevitably drawn to each other, despite their cultural and religious differences and Dalia’s impending marriage, because they’re the hottest most sensitive couple in the movie.

Wintertide, April 1, 9 pm.

According to the official synopsis, Wintertide (directed by John Barnard) is about “an isolated northern city battling a plague of depression that transforms its victims into zombie-like automatons” while everyone else has to take medicine to stay safe. In other words, it’s a quintessentially Canadian winter. On the bright side, the town has some functioning bars, snowplows, and a jail to lock up the depressed zombies known as “strays.” The strays are monitored by people like volunteer watch Beth (Niamh Carolan), who has intimate encounters with men and women, where she apparently divides in two. Apart from that last detail, all this feels too close to real life for comfort.

The Canadian Film Festival also includes two programs of short films, at 2 pm and 4:30 pm on April 1 and a number of master classes and workshops through the week. Tickets for the Canadian Film Fest can be purchased here. Instructions for watching the festival on Super Channel can be found here.