The Canadian Film Fest: Street Food, Westerns, Hearts, and Love in Reverse
By Liam Lacey
The first version of the Canadian Film Fest took place back in 2004.
Doubles
Although this year is not technically its 20th anniversary — the festival was out of action from 2009 to 2011 — it has proved its staying power as a Toronto showcase for new Canadian independent film, working through the COVID pandemic by being carried on the streaming service Super Channel.
This year, the CFF is a local Toronto event again, running from March 18 through 23 at Cineplex’s Scotiabank Theatre with 11 features and 45 short films over six days.
Tonight’s (March 18) opening night film, Ian Harnarine’s Doubles, follows Indo-Trinidadian street vendor Dhani (Sanjiv Boodhu) who travels to Toronto to visit his estranged father in the hopes of getting a deed signed to property at home, but finds the older man (Errol Sitahal) seriously ill. (The title “doubles” refers to a popular Trinidadian street food of fried bread and curried chickpeas).
Doubles has previously screened at the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival in September and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Caribbean Film Festival last month to solid reviews. It has a long history. Back in 2011, director-writer Harnarine won a Genie Award and a Toronto International Film Festival audience award for his short film Doubles with Pepper, executive produced by his New York University professor, Spike Lee.
Other films of note include Place of Bones from Audrey Cummings, a Canadian filmmaker who has specialized in horror (Berkshire County, Darken, She Never Died) here making a western starring Heather Graham as Pandora, a mom defending her home against a vicious bank robber (Tom Hopper) and his gang determined to recover his purloined loot.
In the category of film premises you haven’t seen before, there’s director Kim Albright’s With Love and a Major Organ, a fantasy-comedy film based on screenwriter Julia Lederer’s stage play, set in a mundane mechanical future. One young woman, Anabel (Anna Maguire) literally rips out her heart and sends it to George (Hamza Haq) who she has fallen in love with. Well-reviewed at the South by Southwest Film Festival, it opens theatrically on April 12.
The festival wraps up on Saturday (March 23) The Burning Season, the latest collaboration between Winnipeg director Sean Garrity and actor and co-writer Jonas Chernick (My Awkward Sexual Adventure, The End of Sex) in another film about, well, sex.
Place of Bones
Fresh from strong festival screenings at Whistler and Glasgow, The Burning Season is set at a holiday resort where the middle-aged owner, J.B (Chernick) is about to celebrate his marriage, but things go awry when Alena (Sara Canning) and her husband (Joe Pingue) show up.
The twist here is that the story, cowritten by Chernick and Diana Frances, is that of an affair told backwards; 25 years at the same resort with the same couple, starting Chapter 7 and working back to the prologue when they were in their teens and the event that set them on their compulsive path.
For the complete program, information on industry programming and to purchase tickets, click here.
