No more Canadian ‘ghetto’ at TIFF
TORONTO — Championing Canadian films at the Toronto International Film Festival this year means not waving the flag at all — this 40th edition opening today will be the first in decades not to include a single Canuck-themed program.
The feature film section Canada First! was eliminated after the 2011 fest, and now Canadian shorts have merged with the international shorts section introduced last year.
Festival CEO Piers Handling says the move “speaks to the strength of these films.”
Several filmmakers agree, with veteran director Patricia Rozema questioning how many of her colleagues were keen to highlight their nationality so strongly.
“The idea is that Canadian cinema is strong enough to swim in international waters and I’m fine with that,” says Rozema, who returns this year with the survival tale Into the Forest in the presti- gious special-presentations section. “It’s the problem with every minority, right? Do they have a women’s section? Would I want to be in that women’s section or would I just want to be a film among films?”
Shorts director Connor Jessup says he’s keen to be seen alongside foreign cinema as he introduces his ghost story Boy to audiences. “There’s something about putting films in a Canadian section that felt a little ghettoized to me,” says Jessup, who also stars in the Newfoundland-set comingof-age feature Closet Monster, slotted in the Discovery section.
“It felt like that was a whole section of movies people could write off.”
A glance at this year’s lineup suggests Canadian films have never been stronger — homegrown projects feature heavily in high-profile programs treated to the best venues and time slots usually dominated by Hollywood.
They include Atom Egoyan’s Nazi revenge thriller Remember with Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau; Deepa Mehta’s gangster flick Beeba Boys with Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda; and Lenny Abrahamson’s Irish/Canada co-production Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s bestseller of the same name, starring Brie Larson.
The Canada/Germany co-production is one of four homegrown features among 20 gala presentations. The others include Mehta’s crime thriller, Jon Cassar’s Western adventure Forsaken with Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, and Paul Gross’s war tale Hyena Road, starring himself, Rossif Sutherland and Allan Hawco.
Six other Canuck films are in the special-presentations slate, which includes 57 films overall.
In addition to Rozema’s and Abrahamson’s films, they include Robert Budreau’s Canada/U.K. jazz film Born to Be Blue with Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker; John Crowley’s U.K./Ireland/Canada period piece Brooklyn with Saoirse Ronan; Guy Edoin’s relationship drama Ville-Marie; and Robert Eggers’s Canada/U.S. mys- tery The Witch.
Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood play sisters in Into the Forest, in which a massive power outage forces them to fend for themselves as society collapses.
Rozema says Page was the driving force behind the film, based on Jean Hegland’s novel of the same name. The Juno star found the book and pitched it to Rozema, who immediately joined the project but soon questioned whether she could make something both “raw and elegant.”
“I was afraid as a filmmaker that I wouldn’t be able to make it beautiful, because the forest, by nature, is a mess. It’s not ordered, and I love a clean line,” says Rozema, known for Mansfield Park and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. “But in B.C. [there are] these giant old-growth [trees] with Old Man’s Beard, it’s called. … It was very easy to make it look fabulous.”
TIFF’s slate of 399 films has 39 Canadian features, including coproductions, up from 31 features in each of the two previous years.