It’s really encouraging to behold the variety of Canadian films coming to TIFF 2021, demonstrating that COVID hasn’t stifled the creativity or ambition of the country’s filmmakers. What’s really interesting is the number of movies that went into production before the pandemic which now feel as though they’re in conversation with our current moment. (Night Raiders is practically a documentary at this point.) Read on, and you’ll see what we mean.
Drunken Birds
A decade after his vivid character study Romeo One, Montreal filmmaker Ivan Grbovic returns to the festival – in the Platform program – with this drama about a Mexican cartel functionary (Roma’s Jorge Antonio Guerrero) who flees his home and winds up as a migrant worker in rural Quebec, where he’s drawn into the lives of his host family.
Learn To Swim
If you caught Thyrone Tommy’s evocative Mariner at TIFF in 2016, or in that year’s Canada’s Top Ten Shorts showcase, you’ll be very excited to see what he does with his feature debut – co-written with actor/producer Marni Van Dyk – which stars Mariner’s Thomas Antony Olajide and TIFF rising star Emma Ferreira as a musician and a singer whose music defines their relationship – and vice versa.
The Middle Man
Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer has been a fixture at TIFF for a quarter of a century, endearing himself to audiences with mordant charmers like Eggs, Kitchen Stories, O’Horten and 1001 Grams. And now he’s actually made a movie here, casting Don McKellar, Paul Gross, Sheila McCarthy, Rossif Sutherland and Kenneth Welsh alongside Pål Sverre Hagen and Aksel Hennie in a story of a small town plagued by disasters which recruits a “middle man” to break bad news to people. And yes, it’s a comedy.
Night Raiders
Set in a near-future Canada placed under martial law by “the southern nation” after a devastating invasion, and starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as a Cree woman trying to rescue her young daughter from a re-education school, Danis Goulet’s first feature has been building momentum since its debut at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. And no wonder: its central metaphor has only grown more resonant in the ensuing months.
Scarborough
Premiering in the Discovery section, Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s film of Catherine Hernandez’s award-winning 2015 novel about families trying to stay afloat in a gentrifying Toronto, and kids figuring out who they’re going to be – adapted by Hernandez herself – has an epic scope and a hometown hook that should draw an audience in. At least, that’s what we’re hoping.
Ste. Anne
Manitoba filmmaker Rhayne Vermette’s Wavelengths feature plays out the tentative reunion of a fractured family against the landscape of the eponymous town in Treaty 1 territory. Vermette’s been making striking short films for a decade – Black Rectangle and Domus among them – and we’re excited to see what she does with the larger canvas of a feature film.
Together
In the new short from Albert Shin (In Her Place, Disappearance At Clifton Hill), two strangers meet in an anonymous seaside hotel in South Korea, seal the windows with tape and embark on a very specific ritual. (Despite the entirely contemporary themes of isolation and despair, Shin shot this in 2017.) It’s screening as part of Short Cuts: YYZ Edition, a package of shorts by Toronto filmmakers that also includes Defund, from Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah and Araya Mengesha, and Jack Weisman and Gabriela Oslo Vanden’s evocative documentary Nuisance Bear, a look at the polar bears who wander around Churchill, Manitoba.
Triumph: Rock & Roll Machine
Sam Dunn and Marc Ricciardelli’s rock-doc looks set to follow the same celebratory path as Global Metal, Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage, mixing fan testimonials, archival footage and present-day hangs with the eponymous band. TIFF is screening it at the RBC Lakeside Drive-In at Ontario Place for maximum power, but really? This should have been the opening night gala.
Wildhood
Filmed in English and Mi’kmaw, the new feature from Nova Scotia filmmaker Bretten Hannam follows a teenage kid named Link (Utopia Falls’ Phillip Lewitski) who sets out to find the mother he long believed to be dead with the help of another teen, the two-spirited Pasmay (Joshua Odjik). Michael Greyeyes, fresh off Blood Quantum and Rutherford Falls, turns up in a small role, as does East Coast perennial Joel Thomas Hynes, and Hannam’s North Mountain showed real potential, so we’re keeping an eye on this one.
Wochiigii Io: End Of The Peace
Five years in the making, Haida filmmaker Heather Hatch’s documentary records the resistance – both legal and communal – to the Site C Dam on British Columbia’s Peace River, where Indigenous peoples’ battle to stop the massive hydroelectric development project is steeped in a history of bad faith, disenfranchisement and destruction from provincial and federal governments. It promises to be a grim watch, but a necessary one.
