Canadian films at U.S. festivals look beyond
The U.S. and Canadian experiences at the Sundance Film Festival tend to be vastly different affairs: Americans gaze into a mirror while Canucks look at the world outside their borders.
There’s a reason for this. As America’s premiere film fest, Sundance has a mandate to showcase and promote the work of U.S. filmmakers, primarily those in the independent realm. Dozens of other countries are invited to participate, Canada among them, but Sundance programmers are primarily interested in stories of the American experience at home and abroad.
This is why, among the 110 features announced this week for Sundance 2018, running Jan. 18-28 in Park City, Utah, there’s a preponderance of movies about American legends and outlaws: actors Jane Fonda ( Jane Fonda in Five Acts) and Robin Williams ( Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind); children’s TV star Fred Rogers ( Won’t You Be My Neighbor?); rebel filmmaker Hal Ashby ( Hal); and Animal House writer Doug Kenney ( Futile and Stupid Gesture), to name just a few of the notables.
There are also films about hotbutton issues roiling American society, such as the ongoing sex assault scandals and Hollywood’s white male hegemony: Seeing Allred profiles women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred in the context of the allegations against Bill Cosby, Donald Trump and others; Half the Picture talks to female filmmakers about their fight against Tinseltown’s ingrained sexism; Hale County This Morning, This Evening travels to the Black Belt of the American South to examine and kick against stereotypical stories and images of Black men.
And how’s this for all-American influence on the planet? The factbased espionage thriller The Catcher Was a Spy, bowing in the big-ticket Premieres section, stars Paul Rudd as Moe Berg, a professional baseball player and multilingual Ivy League grad who spied for Uncle Sam against Germany in the race to build the atomic bomb during the Second World War. Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Guy Pearce and Paul Giamatti co-star.
The Canadian films at Sundance, on the other hand, go far beyond our national borders:
Anote’s Ark (Matthieu Rytz): World premiering in the New Climate program of eco-themed stories, this doc visits the low-lying Pacific atoll of Kiribati, which is slated to sink beneath the waves within decades because of rising sea levels wrought by global warming and other human-caused environmental stresses. There are plans to migrate the atoll’s entire population to higher ground, but it’s easier said than done. Sounding a lot like The Island President from 2013, it’s a tale for hot times.
The Oslo Diaries ( Mor Loushy, Daniel Sivan): This Israel/Canada co-production, debuting in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, concerns an untold story of clandestine efforts to broker a peace deal in the Middle East. In 1992, a time when Middle East relations were at rock bottom, a group of Israelis and Palestinians met secretly and illegally in Oslo, hoping to find a way out of the abyss — and what they achieved changed their homelands forever.
Un Traductor (Translator) (Rodrigo Barriuso, Sebastian Barriuso): A Canada/Cuba co-production, based on a true story, that will bow in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Set in the late 1980s, it’s the story of a professor of Russian literature at the University of Havana, played by Rodrigo Santoro. He’s summoned by the Cuban state to work as a translator for child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, who have been sent to Cuba for medical care.
Summer of ’84 (François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann Whissell): This Canada/U.S. co-production from the Quebec trio behind Turbo Kid was shot in Vancouver, but you can bet it’s set in America. Premiering in the Midnight program at Sundance, it’s a horror story in the vein of The Goonies and Fright Night. Set in a waterfront retreat called Ipswich Bay, it concerns a 15-year-old conspiracy theorist who thinks a neighbourhood cop is the serial killer stalking his town. He enlists his pals to check it out.
But there is a place in Park City to see films that are not just made by Canadians but are also about them. That’s the Slamdance Film Festival, Sundance’s crosstown rival which frequently showcases Canuck talent.
There are two Canadian features among the 18 selected for Slamdance 2018, which runs Jan. 19-25:
Fake Tattoos (Pascal Plante): This punk-themed coming-of-ager from Quebec stars Anthony Therrien and Rose-Marie Perreault as Théo and Mag, head-banging rebels without a clue. They bond over tattoos but stress over Théo’s plans to split from the suburbs for greener pastures.
M/M (Drew Lint): This Canada/ Germany co-production stars Antoine Lahaie as Matthew, a “wayward Canadian” now living a lonely life in Berlin. He meets Matthias (Nicolas Maxim Endlicher), and loneliness yields to what the program notes call a “dark fixation of assumed identity” leading to “brutal passion and violence in a bid for dominance.” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.