Unveiling Canada’s Top Ten

December 8, 2011Norman Wilner

It should come as absolutely no surprise that the 2011 lineup of Canada’s Top Ten includes features by David Cronenberg, Philippe Falardeau, Guy Maddin, Sarah Polley and Jean-Marc Vallée. If Deepa Mehta and Denis Villeneuve had made movies this year, they’d be on the list, too imagine the scandal if they weren’t.

But if more than half of the honoured features were givens – Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, Maddin’s Keyhole, Polley’s Take This Waltz, Vallée’s Café De Flore and Nathan Morlando’s Edwin Boyd, which took the Skyy Vodka Award at TIFF for Best Canadian First Feature – the list still offers a few surprises.

Guy Edoin’s Wetlands (Marécages), Ken Scott’s Starbuck and Sébastien Pilote’s Le Vendeur all made the cut, making French-Canadian cinema account for fully half of this year’s list. And Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun represents the East Coast, making this the first time Canada’s Top Ten has included a film in which schoolchildren are set on fire. So there’s that.

There are a couple of curious omissions. Ingrid Veninger’s i am a good person/i am a bad person didn’t make the list despite the inclusion of her previous films Only and Modra. And the black-sheep TIFF hit Goon isn’t there either. Mike Dowse’s ferociously acclaimed comedy would seem an obvious choice, both to reward Canadian commercial filmmaking and to show the world that Canada’s Top Ten isn’t exclusively interested in high-minded works.

Of course, the absence of TIFF 2011’s other hockey comedy, Breakaway, suggests an even simpler explanation: maybe this year’s jurors just weren’t into sports.

The winning features and shorts will screen at TIFF Bell Lightbox in January 2012, along with a panel discussion with selected filmmakers. Full details are available online at tiff.net/topten.