CANADA’S TOP TEN FILM FESTIVAL from Friday (January 12) to January 21 at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West). tiff.net/ctt. Rating: NNNN
Every year, TIFF delivers the list of features and shorts that made it to Canada’s Top Ten, and every year movie critics struggle to find a unifying theme among the winners – or at least to tease out a few interesting connections.
The truth is, there’s almost never a common thread to find: yeah, maybe one year there are more comedies than dramas, or documentaries have a really strong showing, or a legitimate masterpiece emerges and acts as a lightning rod for media attention. And some years, it just feels like a random assortment of features and documentaries of varying quality.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t some good choices in this year’s CTT.
Kyle Rideout’s Adventures In Public School, which is the first film to be screened at the Lightbox (January 12, 8:30 pm repeating January 13, noon), is a delight – an idiosyncratic goof on the high-school comedy featuring a great performance by Daniel Doheny as a home-schooled Vancouver genius who enrols himself in public school to chase his dream girl (Siobhan Williams), and another one by Judy Greer as his twitchy, overprotective mom.
Kathleen Hepburn’s Never Steady, Never Still (January 16, 6 pm January 17, 2:30 pm) similarly marries a great script with terrific performances, but here it’s in the service of a more dramatic tale of an Alberta mother (Shirley Henderson) and her adult son (Théodore Pellerin) struggling through very different personal crises.
And Ava (January 18, 6 pm January 19, 3 pm) marks the feature debut of Tehran-born, Montreal-based filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi, who brings a sharp eye to a study of an Iranian teenager (Mahour Jabbari) trying to define herself in a society (and a home) that would really rather she didn’t.
They’re all small movies, and they’re more interested in telling a story than dazzling us with artful camerawork or high style.
Adventures In Public School, starring Judy Greer and Daniel Doheny, launches the festival with big laughs.
The three documentaries that made the cut are similarly excellent and unrelated beyond the most basic thematic points.
Charles Officer’s Unarmed Verses (January 15, 6 pm January 18, 3:30 pm) and Catherine Bainbridge’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (January 15, 8:30 pm January 16, 3 pm) touch on the connection between performance and identity, with the former looking at a young Black girl experimenting with hip-hop in a Toronto arts program and the latter exploring the way indigenous musicians from Charley Patton and Link Wray to Buffy Sainte-Marie and Redbone influenced the development of American popular music.
And Alanis Obomsawin’s Our People Will Be Healed (January 17, 8:45 pm January 18, 12:30 pm) slots right between them, sharing Rumble’s focus on Indigenous people and Unarmed Verses’s appreciation of education and mentorship in marginalized communities.
The other four features are less distinguished. Robin Aubert’s Quebecois zombie thriller Les Affamés (January 18, 8:45 pm January 21, 7:30 pm) is an effective genre exercise but nothing more Simon Lavoie’s adaptation of Gaétan Soucy’s The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond Of Matches (January 19, 6 pm January 20, 3:30 pm) nearly suffocates Marine Johnson’s go-for-broke performance in ostentatious style.
Wayne Wapeemukwa’s Vancouver Olympics drama Luk’Luk’I (January 20, 6:30 pm January 21, 12:15 pm) is an ungainly expansion of his far more effective short films, and Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s Allure (January 13, 8:30 pm January 20, 9 pm), which screened at TIFF as A Worthy Companion, traps Evan Rachel Wood, Julia Sarah Stone and Denis O’Hare in the mechanisms of a clumsy erotic thriller.
Maybe consider the shorts instead? They’ll screen in two programs of five on the evening of Sunday (January 14).
The first set, at 6 pm, includes Daniel Cockburn’s playful The Argument (with annotations), Heather Young’s subtle character study Milk and Naledi Jackson’s tense two-hander The Drop In along with Torill Kove’s animated charmer Threads and Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis’s Tajikistan documentary The Botanist.
The second, at 8:30 pm, features Yassmina Karajah’s observant Rupture, about a quartet of school-aged refugees visiting a pool in Vancouver Matthew Rankin’s rapturous The Tesla World Light and Marc-Antoine Lemire’s Pre-Drink, along with Vincent Toi’s history lesson The Crying Conch and Amanda Strong’s stop-motion allegory Flood.
Other screenings include the Top Ten student shorts in a single program on Saturday (January 13) at 2:30 pm, a free Canadian Open Vault presentation of Cockburn’s 2010 feature You Are Here (January 14, 12:30 pm) and a rare theatrical screening of Phillip Borsos’s 1990 biopic Bethune: The Making Of A Hero (January 21, 3:30 pm).
And there’s live stuff too! In Conversation With… sessions with Our People Will Be Healed’s Obomsawin (January 17, 6:30 pm) and Allure’s Wood (January 20, 7 pm), and a full day of panels and interviews on Friday (January 12), including a “breakout directors” session with Foroughi, Rideout and the Sanchez brothers (January 12, 3:45 pm), an exploration of Unarmed Verses with director Officer, producer Lea Marin and director of photography Mike McLaughlin (January 12, 2:15 pm) and a taping of the TIFF Long Talk Podcast with veteran film and TV director Jeremy Podeswa (January 12, 5:15 pm).
Any or all of those will be worth your time. Maybe that’s the unifying theme. It’s certainly the only one that matters.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
