The feature films that made Canada’s Top Ten this year are, it turns out, a pretty good representation of the state of our national cinema.
There’s heartfelt personal film making, ambitious international storytelling and idiosyncratic genre work, along with the inevitable debut feature that gets hailed as the work of a distinctive voice when it’s really just someone jumping on the bandwagon of a current cinematic trend.
I still can’t get myself to believe the interconnected misery of The High Cost Of Living is the stuff of great art, but it’s heartening to see Vincenzo Natali’s challenging, deeply weird Splice slipping in to stand alongside strong, specific works like Ingrid Veninger’s MODRA, Bruce McDonald’s Trigger and Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home.
And Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies gets a little boost of visibility as it rolls into Oscar season as our national submission for best foreign-language film.
The films start screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox from January 20.
Top 10 features
BARNEY’S VERSION (Richard J. Lewis)
CURLING (Denis Côté)
HEARTBEATS (Xavier Dolan)
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING (Deborah Chow)
INCENDIES (Denis Villeneuve)
LAST TRAIN HOME (Lixin Fan)
MODRA (Ingrid Veninger)
MOURNING FOR ANNA (Catherine Martin)
SPLICE (Vincenzo Natali)
TRIGGER (Bruce McDonald)
Top 10 shorts
ABOVE THE KNEE (Greg Atkins)
LES FLEURS DE L’AGE (Vincent Biron)
I WAS A CHILD OF HOLOCAUST
SURVIVORS (Ann Marie Fleming)
THE LEGEND OF BEAVER DAM (Jerome Sable)
THE LITTLE WHITE CLOUD THAT CRIED (Guy Maddin)
LIPSETT DIARIES (Theodore Ushev)
MARIUS BORODINE (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais)
MOKHTAR (Halima Ouardiri)
ON THE WAY TO THE SEA (Tao Gu)
VAPOR (Kaveh Nabatian)
