This week, TIFF announced its Canada’s Top Ten lineup – homegrown films made in 2016 that will get another life in theatres.
Here are some previous winners you can watch online:
CLOSET MONSTER is a Newfoundland-set coming-of-age/coming-out/quasi-body-horror picture. Writer/director Stephen Dunn’s feature debut is places heavy emphasis on events from Oscar’s childhood – his parents’ divorce, his witnessing of a bloody hate crime – implying a troubling causality between these early traumas and Oscar’s sexual identity and professional ambitions. (See full Closet Monster review).
Rating: NNN
Available to watch: iTunes
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is less a narrative than a fugue state of half-remembered images from 20s and 30s cinema amped up with feverish desire. Diving into and out of dozens of nested stories (seriously, Inception has nothing on this picture), Maddin and co-director Johnson craft a shifting, unstable landscape of thrilling adventures, performed by a massive international cast that includes Roy Dupuis, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling, Jacques Nolot, Geraldine Chaplin, Karine Vanasse, Clara Furey, Caroline Dhavernas, Ariane Labed and the inevitable Udo Kier. (See our full The Forbidden Room review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
Omar Khadr in a scene from Guantanamo’s Child.
GUANTANAMO’S CHILD: OMAR KHADR is the story of Toronto-born Khadr who was shot and captured during a firefight with U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2002. At 15 he was classified an enemy combatant and shipped to the U.S. facility in Guantánamo Bay, where he spent more than a decade before lawyer Dennis Edney got him repatriated to Canada and ultimately released into his custody. (See our full Guantanamo’s Child: Omar Khadr review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
Ellen Page, left, and Evan Rachel Wood, right, in Into The Forest.
INTO THE FOREST director Rozema proves herself to be master of mood in this story of sisters Nell and Eva (Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood, respectively) who try to survive at their home in a remote forest after a vaguely defined eco-disaster that’s caused a power outage. (See our full Into The Forest review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
MY INTERNSHIP IN CANADA shows writer/director Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie) returning to the antic, slightly goofy tone of his earlier C’est Pas Moi, Je Le Jure! It’s a giddy comedy about fictional Quebec MP Steve Guibord (Patrick Huard), who holds the deciding vote on whether Canada should enter an unspecified war on the other side of the world. To buy time, he announces he’ll consult his constituents – but they’re easily swayed by jingoism and pandering. (See our full My Internship In Canada review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
SLEEPING GIANT is a study of three teenage boys – city kid Adam (Jackson Martin) and rural cousins Riley (Reece Moffett) and Nate (Nick Serino) – bonding and fighting in cottage country. They flirt with trouble. Mostly it’s petty kid crap, like egging houses and boosting beer from a variety store. But there’s something dark about the way Nate needles the other two, and it just gets darker as the weeks pass. (See our full Sleeping Giant review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
NINTH FLOOR probes how in 1969, institutional intransigence at Sir George Williams University and the Montreal police’s fundamental fear of black people conspired to escalate a small sit-in protesting one prof’s racism into a full-scale riot involving hundreds of students. (See our full Ninth Floor review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
OUR LOVED ONES (Les Êtres Chers) is a narratively sprawling generational drama about a Quebec family over the course of a quarter-century or so, focusing primarily on sensitive David Leblanc (Maxim Gaudette) and his daughter Laurence (played from her teen years onward by the terrific Karelle Tremblay), whose lives are shadowed by the mental illnesses of people closest to them. (See our full Our Loved Ones review).
Rating: NNNN
Available to watch: iTunes
