Indigenous films, French zombie flick top list
TIFF chooses top Canadian movies
TORONTO — The Toronto International Film Festival’s list of the top 10 Canadian movies of 2017 is a wide-ranging slate that reflects the diversity of filmmaking in this country, organizers say.
There’s the Quebec-set, Frenchlanguage zombie flick Les Affames by Robin Aubert, which won the best Canadian feature film award at TIFF in September.
Also on the list unveiled this week are a couple of Indigenous documentaries: Our People Will Be Healed by Alanis Obomsawin and Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World by Catherine Bainbridge.
Other titles include Allure, a psychological thriller starring Evan Rachel Wood and directed by sibling photographers Carlos Sanchez and Jason Sanchez.
In Luk’Luk’I, five Vancouverites live on the fringes of society during the 2010 Winter Olympics. The drama/documentary hybrid by Wayne Wapeemukwa, who is of Metis heritage, won TIFF’s best Canadian first feature film award and the Directors Guild of Canada’s 2017 Discovery Award.
“These are stories that really run the gamut, from a genre film like Les Affames ... that trades in what we know about the conventions of the zombie horror film but has a lot to say about Quebec culture as well,” says Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director.
“Then on the other hand you’ve got films like Luk’Luk’I and Rumble, and I think especially Our People Will Be Healed that really speak to what I think is the most urgent story that Canadians are telling right now, which is the story of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.”
TIFF’s annual highlighting of homegrown movies is part of its Canada’s Top 10 Film Festival, which includes 10 days of screenings and events in Toronto and a cross-country tour to Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Regina, Saskatoon, Vancouver and Winnipeg.
The festival kicks off Jan. 12, 2018 in Toronto with the comedy Adventures in Public School by Kyle Rideout.
Other movies include Sadaf Foroughi’s Tehran-set drama Ava, and Simon Lavoie’s The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, about children who have to fend for themselves after their father’s death in rural Quebec in the 1930s.
The list also includes Never Steady, Never Still by Kathleen Hepburn, about a mother battling Parkinson’s disease, and Charles Officer’s documentary Unarmed Verses, about residents facing eviction from a low-income housing block in Toronto.
These are stories that really run the gamut, from a genre film like Les Affames ... that trades in what we know about the conventions of the zombie horror film but has a lot to say about Quebec culture as well.”
Cameron Bailey, TIFF artistic director