TIFF has announced this year’s Canada’s Top Ten, and there are some surprises among the features, both in terms of what was honoured and what was not.
Stephen Dunn’s sexually charged dramedy Closet Monster, Alan Zweig’s Steve Fonyo documentary Hurt, and Andrew Cividino’s brooding coming-of-age drama Sleeping Giant – all prizewinners at TIFF earlier this fall – are among the Top Ten features.
Ninth Floor, Mina Shum’s examination of the Sir George Williams University riot in Montreal, and Guantanamo’s Child: Omar Khadr, Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard’s look at efforts to free the youngest prisoner of the war on terror, are the other winning documentaries.
Anne Émond’s generational drama Our Loved Ones, Philippe Falardeau’s political satire My Internship In Canada and Patricia Rozema’s Into The Forest – starring Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood as sisters in a post-apocalyptic future – are also on the list, as are Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room and Philippe Lesage’s psychological thriller The Demons.
This year marks the first time any filmmaker has been recognized in two categories. Two filmmakers actually – Maddin and Johnson, whose short Bring Me The Head Of Tim Horton and feature The Forbidden Room made it into their respective Top Tens.
(In another first, Cividino’s Sleeping Giant is the first Top Ten film to be based on a previous Top Ten winner. Cividino expanded his feature from a short that was in the 2014 Top Ten.)
It’s been a relatively quiet year for Canadian cinema. Heavy hitters like David Cronenberg and Xavier Dolan didn’t open a feature this year, and Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario and Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition are American productions. But Deepa Mehta’s Beeba Boys, Paul Gross’s Hyena Road and Atom Egoyan’s Remember, relatively big deals when they opened at TIFF in September, are conspicuous by their absence.
The honoured features and shorts will screen at TIFF Bell Lightbox from January 8 to 17, 2016, with introductions by and post-screening Q&As with cast and filmmakers. (There’s also an In Conversation With… session with Kiefer Sutherland, who’s not in any of the Top Ten films.) And there’s a Canadian Open Vault screening of Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin, which marks its 30th anniversary this year.
Canada’s Top Ten features, in alphabetical order
- Closet Monster, Stephen Dunn
- The Demons, Philippe Lesage
- The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson
- Guantanamo’s Child: Omar Khadr, Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard
- Hurt, Alan Zweig
- Into The Forest, Patricia Rozema
- My Internship In Canada, Philippe Falardeau
- Ninth Floor, Mina Shum
- Our Loved Ones, Anne Émond
- Sleeping Giant, Andrew Cividino
Canada’s Top Ten shorts
- Bacon & God’s Wrath, Sol Friedman
- Balmoral Hotel, Wayne Wapeemukwa
- Bring Me The Head Of Tim Horton, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson
- Interview With A Free Man, Nicolas Lévesque
- The Little Deputy, Trevor Anderson
- My Enemy, My Brother, Ann Shin
- Never Steady, Never Still, Kathleen Hepburn
- Nina, Halima Elkhatabi
- O Negative, Steven McCarthy
- Overpass, Patrice Laliberté
Canada’s Top Ten Student Shorts
- Alia, Raghed Charabaty (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)
- The Casebook Of Nips & Porkington, Melody Wang (Sheridan College)
- Cupid, Maria De Sanctis (York University)
- Dysmorphia, Katherine Grubb (Emily Carr University of Art + Design)
- Ed, Taha Neyestani (Sheridan College)
- Menesetung, Kyle McDonnell (Ryerson University)
- Michi, Kaho Yoshida (Emily Carr University of Art + Design)
- Ms. Liliane, Junna Chif (Concordia University)
- Pretty Dangerous, Dan Laera (Humber College)
- Smoke, Kellen Jackson, Suzanne Friesen and Sasha Tomasky (Simon Fraser University)
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