National Canadian Film Day: Navigating the Big Day in Canadian Film Online
By Liam Lacey
If Canadians were as neurotic about size as some countries we know, we might declare National Canadian Film Day, happening on April 16, as “The World’s Most Bigly Film Festival,” boasting as it does 2,000 free screenings across Canada, including 1,000 community screenings, along with hundreds more on broadcast and streaming services, and events in 43 countries.
A scene from My American Cousin, available during National Canadian Film Day.
But for a country that takes pride in its modesty, let’s just say it’s a chance to take a pee break from the vast disaster movie running in a loop on the wide screen to the south of us.
Now in its 12th year, National Canadian Film Day is the brainchild of Sharon Corder and Jack Blum, founders of Reel Canada, a non-profit organization that brings Canadian films to high school students and new Canadians.
The national network, with multiple local partners, has grown over its dozen years, and especially this year. Organizers report that, in this current surge of cultural nationalism, registrations for local events have been running 60 percent higher than last year, with about 100,000 people expected to attend in-person screenings.
The horror It Feeds screens as part of National Canadian Film Day. Read more about it…
National Canadian Film Day is linked to other film festivals in Canada and around the world in international embassies and film festivals, so you can even catch a Canadian film if you’re travelling through Madrid, Minneapolis or Reykjavik. Some local organizations, such as the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Yukon Film Society in Whitehorse, are even extending it to National Film Week with screenings over several days.
No doubt the event is complicated. But for a multicultural population, historically used to navigating vast and varied terrains, complicated is normal. As Pierre Berton once famously said, a Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe. In that brave spirit, let’s dip our paddles on the National Canadian Film Day’s website — literally — and follow some of its many tributaries.
The first drop-down menu on the top left is called “Spotlight Films.” Clicking on it takes us to a page called “Something to Believe In” with links to 60 “inspirational” films under five categories (“Big Dreams,” “Community & Family,” “Fighting for Your Beliefs,” “The Power of Art” and “Resilience”).
These films can be searched according to title, genre, language, accessibility and so on. A separate category entitled “One Voice” is defined as “Films about characters from underrepresented/marginalized groups where the filmmaker shares the same identity” which includes 171 entries.
Second from the left on the website’s is the more broadly useful dropdown, “See A Film.” The sub-menu items include “Find a Local Event,” “Special Event,” and “Special Guests,” followed by three places you can watch films: on broadcast television, streaming, and in local theatres.
Finding a local screening shouldn’t be too hard. You can attend any one of 527 local screenings going on across the country, offered at various cinemas and public halls. “Special Events” includes the town hall-style meeting Elbows up For Canadian Culture on Wednesday evening at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto with guests Yannick Bisson, Don McKellar, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Mary Walsh, hosted by CBC’s Ali Hassan. “Special Guests,” meanwhile, offers a catalogue of more than 100 film artists and industry professionals appearing at various screenings.
Other “Special Events” also include advance screenings of a half-dozen yet-to-be-released Canadian films, and anniversary screenings of eight films, including C.R.A.Z.Y, Crime Wave, Ginger Snaps, My American Cousin, Rude, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, Waydowntown, and White Room. Who knew that Crime Wave and My American Cousin had both turned 40?
“Broadcast” and “Screening Platforms” links will lead you to a dozen broadcasters that will show a total of 201 Canadian films as part of their regular schedules. Another 25 streaming services will offer hundreds more, including available to their subscribers or rental.
Occasionally, one of these tributaries leads to a dead end, which can be perplexing. The website offers a searchable database called Canadian Film Collection, which is a great idea but it’s flawed.
For example, would you like to revisit one of the most acclaimed films in Canadian history, Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (1971)? Jutra’s coming-of-age drama, set in a Quebec asbestos mining town in the 1940s, was twice voted the greatest Canadian film in Sight & Sound polls, and three times in the Toronto International Film Festival’s top Canadian films of all time and selected as one of Roger Ebert’s Great Movies.
The National Canadian Film Day site, using the German-based Just Watch guide, says the film is unavailable for streaming, which isn’t true. You can watch Mon Oncle Antione, in both a subtitled and dubbed version (though that would be weird) on the National Film Board’s website for free.
For Jutra’s subsequent film, Kamarouska (1973) with Geneviève Bujold, the site offers the option of renting it from Apple TV. In fact, you can watch it, legally and for free, on YouTube.
In short, the National Canadian Film Day website is a good place to start. But the journey goes many more places.