The strength of the English language Canadian film lineup in 2024 was outside the WIFF Prize in Canadian Film category, as we only saw 2 of the 3 titles. Some very pleasant surprises from films we knew little about. None of them were particularly bad.
Players, The Emily (Stefani Kimber) is a teenage girl who is excited about trying out for an avant garde theatre troupe in Toronto in the summer of 1994. Emily is even happier after she gets accepted. She has some emotional holes in her life and fills them up with the love of theatre. She soon finds herself immersed in this world, including smoking and later drinking. The director Reinhardt (Eric Johnson) wants to take the show and Emily to Montréal. Marley (Jess Salgueiro) is one of the veteran actors who take a shine to Emily and protects her. Then Marley leaves the troupe. Is Emily more vulnerable? Sarah Galea-Davis takes us intimately into this space and weaves a compelling story. You feel like Galea-Davis or someone she knows truly has lived this story. Kimber is amazing as a young actor who has to carry this film. The #MeToo element may be difficult for some to watch but the message is powerful and entertaining.
Shook This film paints Scarborough as being light years from downtown Toronto, especially if you miss the last TTC train of the night and have to take the blue night bus. Our main character Ashish (Saamer Usmani) is a writer who had a good novella but is struggling with a short story. He meets a barista Claire (Amy Forsyth) who makes the moves on Ashish. He is also struggling with his estranged father being diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. Amar Wala had done documentaries and this is his feature film debut. Wala gives Ashish real friends and they have lives outside of Ashish. Too often we see men struggle alone in films without much support. Ashish and Claire struggle to be on the same page, in part because Ashish is stuck in the many facets that is his world in the moment. A very quiet, delightful mature film.
Darkest Miriam Miriam is a librarian at the Allan Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Library. Miriam shakes books hoping to find secret notes on the inside. She love reading stories to children. The stories that she tells about her father changes over time. Miriam meets a man, a taxi driver as they share lunch outside of the library branch. They date. She deals with odd interactions within the library and gets strange notes. This is a dark film as the title implies. Miriam is not as dark but her world certainly is. When she is with her boyfriend, the lighting is very dim. An odd sort of film but you find yourself wanting to know more about Miriam.
Do I Know You From Somewhere? This film plays with relationships where we start out with Benny and Olive, who meet at a wedding. They are in a cabin. Olive is searching for something but doesn't know what. Soon other things and people disappear and letters end up on the refrigerator, spelling out something from a different plane. Who is Ada? Cece? What about Cece's wagon. Those expecting a linear presentation will be severely disappointed. Enjoyed the film for what it was trying to do but you could feel incomplete after watching the film. One of 2 films in the festival (Drive Me Home) set in New Brunswick. I liked the film overall but can easily see why others many not have the patience to follow along. The film is shockingly short but fit the time needed to tell the story.
Can I Get A Witness? Ann Marie Fleming dazzled us with Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming in 2016. The idea of a fable in a world that settled climate change but people had to die at 50 was tremendously intriguing. Kiah (Keira Jang) is starting her first day as a witness along with seasoned witness Daniel (Joel Oulette). Ellie (Sandra Oh, the main voice in Window Horses) is going through stuff in her home as she wishes her daughter good luck in her new career. Kiah and Daniel go along on bicycles since there are no more cars. The older people have varied reactions to the necessity of their demise. Fleming uses drawings to supplement the live action footage. Kiah draws the events since photography is too unsettling in this world. Your humble narrator saw parallels to Last Night, the Don McKellar (1998) featuring Oh. There are a handful of films that bring on a lot of tears and this film made me cry more than any film in recent memory. Tears of joy for such a beautiful telling of a story. Thoughtful, very meaningful, and a simple delight to watch. I will find this film and see it 2, maybe 3 times.
Sweetland A very dark and laid-back film based on plans to gather everyone out of a rural Newfounland fishing village. One man is reluctant to leave everything he knows. Eventually, he agrees to leave but he finds himself as the last one left in the town. He wanders around the deserted village for awhile. You need to be in a mood to absorb all that you see. A little hard to follow until you realize some of these details aren't that important. More of a feeling in watching this film. As unofficially required of a Newfoundland film, Mary Walsh and Andy Jones have small roles. Watch this on a cloudy day or a very dark night.
Kaniehtiio Horn channelled her rage into Seeds, her directorial debut (Q with Tom Power)
Seeds Kaniehtiio Horn has a lot to do in this film: actor (her day job) as well as writer/director (her feature length debut). Ziggy is a young Mohawk woman who becomes an influencer for a seed company. She is interrupted when she has to go back to help out family on the reservation. Her fellow reservation people tell her she is a sellout. Soon she discovers a more sinister element at work once she is on the reservation. Horn uses Graham Greene as himself as an elder providing Ziggy advice from some plane of existence. This film is a message film about not having corporate control and protection over food production. There are elements of a horror film at times but not a true horror film. A reasonably clever plot point, Horn as an actor carries out her own creative process. Your humble narrator is biased because we are fans of Horn. Still, the film is a nice debut with something to say without being preachy.
40 Acres The Freemans are a Black and Indigenous family defending their farmland in Canada in a post-apocalyptic world where food is scarce. Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) and her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) are in charge. Hailey is not very trusting, which is mostly good in the world where they are. There is a lot of shooting and killing in this film. Reminded me at times of the Jeff Barnaby film Blood Quantum, which featured Greyeyes. R.T. Thorne is definitely aware of food and history and wars involving food. Besides the 40 Acres title, there is a reference to the spice wars, where thousands, if not millions, died over the trade of spices. If you can get past the violence, your eyes will be open in a good way to a strong presentation of an intriguing plot.
Aberdeen Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) has been through a lot. Generational trauma with residential schools. Massive flooding forced her off of the reservation and stuck in Winnipeg hotels for 4 years. She gets kicked out of the hotel and is living on the streets. The search for her missing IDs — in part due to police harassment — is a metaphor for deeper pain. Her daughter (Darla Contois, Little Bird) is strung out on drugs. Aberdeen finds out her grandkids are in foster care, but she isn't in a position to take care of them herself. A trip back to the reservation and a meeting with an old friend Grace (Jennifer Podemski) helps her attitude a bit. Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas, in their directorial debut, bring us a hard film to absorb but resist the temptation to stop watching. This is worth the depressive feeling you get part way through the film.
Drive Back Home This film has a lot going for it: opposites in brothers, road trip, period piece (1970), a film set in New Brunswick, being hidden and gay, English-French language divide. A elderly mother insists her son in Stanley, New Brunswick pick up his brother in Toronto and drive him back. The Toronto man is caught essentially being a homosexual. The condition for release is if a relative would come pick you up. The script is realistic and the dynamics between the brothers is fascinating. English actor Alan Cumming wears the hidden persona well, all the way down to his bad hairpiece. An important film that happens to be entertaining.
WIFF Prize in Canadian Film
Paying for It Sook-Yin Lee knows this story all too well, the telling of Chester Brown's (Dan Beirne) graphic novel. After they break up in real life, he decides to pay for sex instead of dealing with the emotional element of relationships. Sonny (Emily Lê) is Lee's alter ego and struggles with actual relationships. Brown has actual cartoonist friends and they are real characters in this drama. The film is rather realistic about the aspects of paying for sex. Beirne/Brown is naked often on screen, all tastefully done yet in context of reality. While the film may seem to be about sex, the story is really about the different directions of human relationships. You don't feel like Lee put her ego into this excursion, reflecting a reasonably objective presentation of material she knows quite well. There is an intimacy to this film yet also exposes the lack of intimacy in the interactions with the sex workers. Not a film for the kids, but a first date or second date film to get the conversation going about the dynamic of relationships.
Sharp Corner Jason Buxton waited 12 years to deliver a second feature, a rather unusual tale from rural Nova Scotia (his home province). Josh (American actor Ben Foster) and Rachel (Cobie Smulders) find the perfect home for them and their son. Turns out their new home is a magnet for car crashes. This horrifies Rachel, who is also concerned for her son. Josh has a very different reactions to the car crashes. He builds intimacy with the victims, such as stealing the phone from a dying man and uploading that content to his work computer. The spiral of Josh is the key path of the film. Rachel and her son get out of the house. She makes selling the house part of the divorce deal, which hampers his increased desire, on some level, to stay in the house. This film delivers what it promises, which is a lot of what you want from a film. This isn't quite a horror film but does have some of its qualities, more of a psychological drama.
We didn't get a chance to watch Really Happy Someday from J Stevens.
photo credit: 40 Acres
video credit: PÖFF | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Overview English French Documentaries
Comments