"I didn’t have the courage to do Cleopatra, so I did it in Canada." — a paraphrase of what Dame Maggie Smith said in Tea with the Dames (2018).
Tea with the Dames is not a Canadian film but Smith's comedic timing made a Canadian audience laugh. That is a good way to start out our look at the Canadian films at the 2018 Windsor International Film Festival.
Feature films
Giant Little Ones is about 2 teenage boys — Franky Winter (Josh Wiggins) and Ballas Kohl (Darren Mann) — who are very tight. Both are key members of the school swim team. They have an unseen encounter after Frankie's birthday party. The next day, Ballas accuses Frankie of making a sexual move on him and ends the friendship.
All the signs are there. Franky's best friend is a lesbian (Niamh Wilson) who is trying to come up with a replica phallus. He isn't aggressively into girls. And his dad (Kyle MacLachlan) left his mom (Maria Bello) to be with another man.
Franky starts hanging out with Tash, the kid sister of Ballas. Tash has the reputation of being a "slut" but we find out that was more sexual assault than "slut."
Writer-director Keith Behrman doesn't take the obvious paths for Franky or the other characters. Female characters in these type of films are often 1-dimensional at best. Taylor Hickson as Tash will break your heart with her surprising vulnerability around Franky that no one else gets to see. Wilson as Mouse, Franky's lesbian friend, is sweet and funny in her phallus curiosity.
I did wonder if the presence of American actors MacLachlan and Bello would be overwhelming but both actors respected the story and responded accordingly. This story is a great example of how Canadian film can tell certain stories in a mature adult fashion that an American film could never do.
Splinters is not your typical coming out story from a filmmaker (Thom Fitzgerald) who is stellar in handling gay and lesbian issues on film. Belle (Sofia Banzhaf) returns to her family in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia for her father's funeral. Belle left the family after the acrimony of coming out as a lesbian to her mother. Now Belle has a boyfriend but doesn't want to tell her mother.
The interaction with Belle, mother Pearl (Deb Allen), and brother Greg (Bailey Maughan) feels like a play at times, even after the boyfriend Rob (Callum Dunphy) shows up anyway.
Belle is wrestling whether to be with Rob or with women. Her ex-fiancee Claire also lives in the small town and Belle and Claire run into each other. Sofia Banzhaf performs well as the lead and has to do a lot in this film.
Fans of The Hanging Garden from deep in Fitzgerald's past will recognize the ghost imagery in both films. Look for folk musician Stewart Legere performing during the wake at the house, a nice Nova Scotia touch.
The Grizzlies is based on the real-life story of a lacrosse team in Kugluktuk, a hamlet that is the westernmost community in Nunavut.
The story follows the path of typical sports films. Russ Sheppard (Ben Schnetzer) is using his time in the North to pay off student debts and parlay that experience into a desired teaching position. Sheppard is there to teach history but it's not the history of the people in the classroom. They have many reasons why they aren't in school. Sheppard tries to motivate them, struggles with that, but then comes up with lacrosse as a way to keep them off the streets.
The difference is this film shows the native actors dealing with real-life saga of teen suicides, choosing between school and hunting for needed food, teen pregnancy, and domestic abuse.
Miranda de Pencier directed and co-produced the film with Nunavut filmmaker Stacey Aglok MacDonald, who is from Kugluktuk. Moira Walley-Beckett, showrunner for Anne with an E, and Graham Yost co-wrote the script.
Will Sasso has a role as the best friend to Sheppard who shows him the ropes of the area.
The film balances the need for a motivational sports title with true-to-life stories about people who live in such hamlets. We learn small things about the culture such as not needing to knock on people's doors.
1991 is the latest installment from Ricardo Trogi in a series of films that reflect moments from his life. In 1991, Trogi is studying screenwriting at UQAM when he goes off to study in Italy mostly to chase after a young woman. If you had seen 1981 and 1987, you wouldn't be surprised about Italy since his family is Italian-Canadian. The humour is similar to the other 2 films where Ricardo Trogi (our protagonist) has a lot of flaws and mishaps.
When Trogi finally finds the Canadian embassy, he does make reference to how much nicer this was than a theoretical Quebec embassy had the 1980 referendum gone through. Trogi also name drops Rene Levesque. At several points, Trogi does speak of being a proud Quebecer.
Baby Blues (2008) is a locally shot film that I picked over a current locally shot film (The Control). Josie is starting over. She has to talk her way into a waitress job at the Whistling Kettle Country Dinner (an actual local restaurant). Her friend Mani helps get Josie the job. She tells Josie "if they order fries, suggest gravy."
Josie meets Max, a musician customer who only orders water and sits at a table for hours. Turns out Josie and Max are both hiding secrets. We see Josie's flashbacks so we know something tragic happened.
The film has a few flaws such as waiting way too long to reveal Josie's issues, wondering what kind of diner allows customers to order only water, and certain elements of her back story. Those who complain that Canadian film looks like well, Canadian film, this film doesn't have the best production values.
The characters are likable and the story is interesting enough. The major issue is that the story keeps the audience too much in the dark for far too long.
2018 Windsor International Film Festival preview
2017 WIFF Canadian films in review
2017 Windsor International Film Festival preview
Horror films
Canada is really good at horror films, whether the obvious scare or a more subtle fright. The 2018 Windsor International Film Festival featured 3 different kinds of fright.
Level 16 takes us in what might seem to be a finishing school for teenage girls but set in a prison. Reaching Level 16 is the last level before adoption. The young women have gone through years of obedience in a world where making friends can be dangerous.
Katie Douglas, who you might know from Mary Kills People, is Vivien, a tough girl who demands the best bed when she gets to Level 16. Sophia (Celina Martin) tries to convince Vivien that things are not what they seem in their world.
Sara Canning (Miss Brixil) and Peter Outerbridge (Dr. Miro) are very well cast as the adults in the institution. You might remember Outerbridge from Kissed and Better than Chocolate.
Danishka Esterhazy gives us a world of heightened femininity but also feminist in that no man is literally going to save them. The film works as science fiction and horror but is engrossing if you like neither genre.
What Keeps You Alive is part psychological thriller with plenty of horror to be found. A lesbian couple settle into a cabin in the middle of the woods. The cabin has been in Jackie's (Hannah Emily Anderson, Shoot the Messenger) family since just after Canadian confederation. Jackie's wife Jules meets Sarah, a childhood friend of Jackie's who calls Jackie "Megan." Sarah also reveals that their childhood friend Jenny drowned in the lake next to the cabin when they were teenagers.
Writer-director Colin Minihan takes us through an intense pace with well-drawn characters. You never quite know what is happening. This is a smartly presented horror film. The film was shot in Muskoka, ON.
Summer of ‘84 takes us back to a simpler time when people could genuinely be scared. A group of teenage boys in a suburban area in Oregon get caught up in an adventure searching for a serial killer loose who targets teenage boys.
The time period means the boys have to do old-fashioned detective work such as using walkie-talkies. The references are oddly placed at best and at worst feel false to people who lived through those times, especially in suburban Oregon.
The film takes a long time to develop and with little character development to motivate you to stick with the film. There is a serial killer loose yet the only ones who care are the teenage boys. The twists that come at the end feel cheap. The filmmakers did a good job at giving you a bland horror film from this era. That might be genius in a meta direction but might not be too entertaining.
Documentaries
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch follows the pattern of the previous 2 documentaries (Watermark, Manufactured Landscapes) from Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky. The films are filled with beautiful photography and minimalist dialogue. The latest installment deals with the environmental messes caused by human beings.
The film takes us around the world; the only Canada mention was the logging of British Columbia rainforests. There is a segment about the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland and another segment from London where a former bomb shelter has been turned into a hydroponics farm. Does the film tell us whether these things are bad or just there? The film just shows us things, such as an accumulation of elephant tusks. We do know that is bad.
Sharkwater Extinction is the project Canadian filmmaker and environmental activist Rob Stewart was working on when he died from a dive that went very wrong. The film started as a follow-up to Sharkwater (2006) that first brought attention to harvesting sharks for shark fin soup.
The film takes us to Costa Rica, a country where things were bad for sharks. Laws made things better but a change in government meant more trouble for sharks. We also go to Los Angeles and Miami. In the latter city, Stewart and his crew investigate restaurants and grocery stores looking for shark DNA in products such as pet food and beauty products. Stewart notes that 150 million sharks killed each year but 80 million are unaccounted for in terms of how they died.
The film also covers Key Largo, the site of the final dive. The epilogue covers the accident, coverage, and legacy. (There is a documentary called The Third Dive for more on the accident.)
Stewart turns out to be very personable. Even if you are scared of sharks, you will be on the side of sharks after seeing this film. That makes all the more tragic what happened to Stewart.
Unnamed Verses explores the threatened demolition of 121 housing units in North York in Toronto to build condos. But we learn soon into the film that the story is about the residents of Villaways, specifically Francine Valentine, a young teenage girl who likes to write but is shy to share when she has a chance to record her poetry via rap.
The arts studio in the housing project helps the kids learn and appreciate the world outside the project, including a trip to see the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
We learn that the process for trying to get back into the new housing is complicated. But the film is mostly focused on Francine's world. The gentrification angle gets lost as the personification of people who live in a housing project dominates the film.
Canadian film review: The Fireflies Are Gone
CanadianCrossing.com film reviews
CanadianCrossing.com film coverage
Canadian films not reviewed were The Control; Ferris's Room; Roobha; and Transformer.
The Fireflies Are Gone was one of 2 French-Canadian films in the film festival along with 1991. We reviewed that film separately earlier this month.
The 2019 Windsor International Film Festival will celebrate its 15th anniversary with 10 days of film November 1-10, 2019.
video credit: YouTube/Movieclips Indie
photo credit: The Grizzlies film
logo credit: Windsor International Film Festival
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