Windsor International Film Festival: Proving That Smaller Can Be Better

By Chris Knight

The Windsor International Film Festival turns 20 this year, and it truly is a happy anniversary.

The 11-day event, on now through November 3, comprises 213 features (up from 186 last year) and 20 shorts from 42 countries. Including repeat showings, there are more than 327 screenings spread out over the festival’s run.

Russians at War

Taking place in the shadow of Toronto’s International Film Festival — which wraps about five weeks before Windsor’s kicks off — WIFF-to-TIFF comparisons are inevitable. But Windsor is truly its own animal, with its own unique personality.

One of its charms is the breadth of its French-language offerings — 58 of the festival’s films this year (more than 25 percent) are Francophone features.

It makes sense. After all, the first Europeans to settle in the area were French — Detroit, across the river, is French for “strait” — and while Windsor is named after a town in England, many of its street names are French, including Ouellette, Pelissier, Pierre, Lauzon and more.

Executive director and chief programmer Vincent Georgie — hard to miss this year, seemingly everywhere and sporting a red tuxedo jacket and a proud smile — is also bilingual.

I didn’t plan it this way, but five of the six movies I managed to catch during a brief stay at WIFF this year were Francophone Canadian productions, including the beautiful opening-night film Shepherds, which also won the best Canadian film prize at TIFF this year. Sophie Deraspe directs Felix-Antoine Duval in the true story of a disillusioned Quebecer who wants to become a shepherd in France, despite knowing nothing about the vocation.

I also saw a pair of edge-of-your-seat thrillers (Lucy Grizzly Sophie and Hunting Daze) and the absurdist comedy Universal Language, set in a near-future Winnipeg in which the two official languages are Persian and French, and the currency is not the Iranian rial but the Canadian riel, named after the rebellious Louis no doubt.

Rounding out my French-language experience was the documentary The Last French Canadian, which offers a tour through Canada’s many Francophone communities in a whirlwind 51 minutes. (Very informative for this Anglophone.)

My one English-language screening was My Dad’s Tapes, a very personal documentary from Canadian filmmaker Kurtis Watson, who was eight years old in 2006 when his father disappeared and was found a month later, dead by apparent suicide. Watson unpacks the family’s grief and trauma, aided by a collection of his dad’s home movies, which seem to show a happy-go-lucky husband and father.

While the Windsor festival is small by Toronto standards, that also makes navigation a snap. Four screens in three locations are all you need to get to, and they’re no more than a 10-minute walk from one another.

Plus, each has its own character and charm. The Chrysler Theatre has more than 1,100 plush seats (and a balcony!) and was jam-packed for the opening-night feature. The same building hosted the raucous afterparty, which included a live marching band that marched through the festivities.

WIFF honcho Vincent Georgie

The Armouries, built in 1900 during the last days of the reign of Queen Victoria, accommodates just 134 viewers, but its steeply raked seats and highly placed screen make it a good venue for subtitled fare. The building also hosts a 20th anniversary retrospective exhibit this year, one that includes posters and other art, a people’s choice ballot box, and car speakers from the two years that the pandemic forced the festival to reinvent itself as a drive-in.

The Capitol Theatre will appeal to traditionalists, since in opened in 1920 as an actual moving picture palace. It’s since been split in two, with the larger Pentastar Theatre seating 626, and the Kelly Theatre holding 205 patrons. It’s also right next door to the WIFF box office and gift shop, where the swag includes T-shirts, film-themed socks and collectible pins of each of the venues.

WIFF, like TIFF, has its People’s Choice Award, which in previous years has gone to Whiplash, Trumbo, Maudie and Women Talking. This year’s winner will be announced at the end of the festival, followed by a free screening.

Already announced on the first Sunday of the fest is the winner of the $25,000 WIFF Prize in Canadian Film, voted on by a jury headed up this year by filmmaker Don McKellar.

This year’s prize went to Who Do I Belong To, directed by Meryam Joobeur. It’s the story of a family in rural Tunisia whose faith and loyalty are challenged when their missing son returns home with a dark secret. McKellar called this debut feature “a bold stylistic film that tells its story through layers of poetic imagery that culminate with a visceral impact.”

Recent winners of the prize have included last year’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person by Ariane Louis-Seize, and 2022’s Riceboy Sleeps by Anthony Shim. Eligible films this year included the aforementioned Hunting Daze, Lucy Grizzly Sophie and Universal Language, as well as Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, On Earth as in Heaven, Paying For It, Really Happy Someday and Sharp Corner.

Rounding out that list: Russians at War, an anti-Russian film that has nonetheless garnered protests from Ukrainian populations in Canada and around the world for being allegedly pro-Russian. TIFF and several other international film festivals pulled the movie from their lineups, citing safety concerns, but WIFF has been one of the few to go ahead and screen this important documentary about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There are numerous other diversions that make WIFF a unique festival experience. A morning stroll along the city’s riverside walking path is a lovely way to start the day, especially when, as is the case this year, the warm weather lingers into November.

Then there’s the lively spot-the-film montage that precedes each screening, edited by Windsor native Maria Cusumano, and featuring clips from most if not all of the festival’s offerings.

Despite working full-time in post-production for Unreasonable Studios in Toronto, Cusumano found time (roughly a month) to watch seven hours of film clips and trailers, winnow that down to about an hour of categorized shots (running, jumping, hugs, fights, crying, kisses, explosions, etc.) and then craft that into a tight two-minute reel, full of fantastic juxtapositions and match cuts.

“I've been working on the trailers for WIFF since 2014 when I was freshly graduated from University,” she told me. “Cutting this trailer each year has been a wonderful measure of how much my work has grown and changed, and I'm always very excited to see the audience reaction.”

Then there’s the festival’s welcoming attitude and general bonhomie. Volunteers are numerous and friendly, and filmmakers, if not on the level of a Soderbergh or Gerwig, can be spotted mingling with the crowds.

I spent a lovely half hour talking about Megalopolis with McKellar, and then whiled away the rest of the evening listening to filmmaker and Canadian film jury member Joey Klein discuss working with Atom Egoyan, Bruce McDonald, Ridley Scott and others.

Oh, and another little inside-baseball detail. WIFF board member Katharen Bortolin told me how, at one point in the festival’s history, the lineups and cinema entrances got so efficient that patrons were smarting, not having enough time to chat to others in the queue about what was worth seeing.

The solution was to introduce a little bit of disorder and disruption, just enough to encourage all-important, in-line conversations. I’ve never heard of another film festival having such a problem. But then again, there’s no other film festival just like Windsor.

As mentioned, the Windsor International Film Festival is on now until November 3. If you can’t make it, Bortolin tells me that they’ll start planning for next year almost as soon as this year’s is over, so watch for similar dates in 2025.