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| Podz (centre) with Dolan and Castonguay on the set of Miraculum |
I’ve also been lucky to see several upcoming Canuck festival
hopefuls in various stages at test screenings and whatnot. I can’t say which
ones, unfortunately, but I will say there is a lot to look forward to, as the
four films ranged from very good to very humorous to midnight B-movie fun to
not-so-great-but-could-be-if-given-a-substantial-recut. I’d see all of them in
their final versions, too, and I look forward to reviewing them at the
festival.
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| Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman in Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners |
Interestingly enough, some of the most high profile films by
Canadian directors will bring the intersection of local and global to the
festival, as many of the country’s top filmmakers will likely be hitting the
festival with international films. Denis Villeneuve, Atom Egoyan, Paul Haggis,
and Jean-Marc Vallée will presumably present Prisoners, Devil’s Knot, Third Person and Dallas Buyers Club, respectively, in top spots at Toronto and/or
Venice and Telluride. Villeneuve and Egoyan could actually appear with both
hands full, as they each have a Canadian film that could be at the festival.
Villeneuve’s José Saramago adaptation An
Enemy is almost inevitable for the festival(s), but Egoyan’s Toronto-shot Queen of the Night might not be 100% ready.
Likewise, Denys Arcand has his first film in six years, Deux nuits (Two Nights)
in the works, but it too might not be complete for TIFF.
Even if the big players aren’t ready, Toronto could really
shine a light on Canadian talent. I’ve already written about a few Canuck films
that could make a splash at TIFF, like Gabrielle, Hold Fast, and An Enemy, and Xavier Dolan’s Tom
à la ferme has already be predicted as a festival contender by many other
outlets, so instead here’s a list of ten additional films I hope to see at the
festival:
Baby How’d We Ever Get This Way
“He's trying to get
his mojo back and she's in jail for screwing a twelve-year-old,” says director
Bruce McDonald (Trigger) while
summing up his new film to NOW Magazine.
There’s also some mention of a big eight foot cube containing a naked chick
debating reading Das Kapital. Sounds
like classic Bruce McDonald indeed. I’m psyched. McDonald once again shoots
against the backdrop of Toronto—nobody else frames the city like he does—for this
dark comedy. Baby How’d We Ever Get This
Way stars Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kelly
Harms, and Sarah Allen (from How to Rid Your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You!) alongside Stephen McHattie
(Pontypool), Meghan Heffern (Old Stock), and Jodi Balfour (“Bomb
Girls”). The title comes from the song by Andy Kim, so maybe
we can hope for another great soundtrack from McDonald? (And another great
film, of course!)
Empire of Dirt
The Grand Seduction
Hard Drive
William D. MacGillivray’s career has been fairly quiet since
1988’s Life Classes. Life Classes is an unusual tale of how
we see and express ourselves through art. It might have been eclipsed by David
Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which
offered a similar allegory with a greater punch, but Life Classes is nevertheless a notable film for Maritime Canada
from the 1980s for its lovely story that highlights the importance of seeing ourselves on our own screens. MacGillivray returns with his first dramatic film in over
twenty years with an adaptation of Hal Niedzviecki’s novel Ditch. Hard Drive is a
dark psychological drama and tale of young love between an American runaway
named Debs (Laura Wiggins) and a Canadian underachiever named Ditch (Douglas
Smith). Joining MacGillivray and company in this Halifax-shot film is Anne of Green Gables star Megan Follows,
who helped attract audiences to Canadian content with the hit miniseries based
on the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Could Hard
Drive be a comeback for her too?
I Put a Hit on You
Full disclosure: I really want this film to do well. I
contributed to the Indiegogo campaign last year (not much/ blogger funds), but
it’s one of the only projects I’ve come across to wind up on the positive side
of my love/hate relationship with crowd-sourcing. I Put a Hit on You is worth the donation because directors Dane
Clark and Linsey Stewart have proven themselves as adept tellers of lo-fi love
stories. (Their short Margo Lily is truly
lovely.) Hit, their feature debut as
directors, could provide a good snapshot of contemporary Canadian cinema with
its unconventional love story about a broken-hearted woman (Sarah Canning, “The
Vampire Diaries”), who teams up with her ex-boyfriend (Aaron Ashmore, “Smallville”)
to stop the hit man she accidentally hired to kill him. It’s already been a
good year for indie comedies in Canada, so fans of Picture Day, Molly Maxwell,
and Old Stock (for which Clark wrote
the clever script) will want to put Hit
in their sights if it plays at the festival.
Miraculum
Podz (aka Daniel Grou) earned Genie/Canadian Screen Award Best
Picture nominations for his previous films 10½
and L’affaire Dumont. Nevertheless,
Canadians outside Quebec probably had a better chance of seeing the impressive L’affaire Dumont on an airplane than
they did of watching it in a theatre. It sounds like Podz is working on a
larger scale than before with Miraculum,
so this might be the film that introduces him to a wider audience. The film has
the added attraction of reuniting I
Killed My Mother stars Xavier Dolan and Anne Dorval for a multi-narrative
ensemble film in which characters intersect and affect the lives of others. L’affaire Dumont star Marilyn Castonguay
also appears as Dolan’s fellow Jehovah’s Witness. Produced by Pierre Even and
Marie-Claude Poulin, who took Canada to the Oscars last year with Rebelle, Miraculum brings some of Quebec’s biggest talent together both in
front of and behind the camera. Miraculum
sounds like an event for Canadian
film! Miraculum only wrapped filming
in early May and TIFF’s submission deadline was May 24, so it’s possible that
something was submitted on time for the film to be accepted and arrive at the
festival in a final cut. Fingers crossed. Miraculum
opens in Canada November 15, so the wait won’t be too long if it doesn’t
show up in Toronto.
Queen of the Night
Is it too much to hope that Atom Egoyan will pull double
duty at the festival? Devil’s Knot
seems like a stronger bet to make an appearance in Toronto while Queen of the Night might wait until
Berlin. Egoyan and some of his Devil’s
Knot co-stars must have gotten along well, as Mireille Enos and Kevin
Durand are working with the director on both projects. The actors join Ryan
Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, and Egoyan film regular Bruce Greenwood in this
thriller about a father (Reynolds) in
search of his missing daughter. Queen of
the Night sounds to have overtones of Devil’s
Knot, plus Exotica, with its tale
of lost children, and it’s the kind of delicate subject matter that the
director handles extremely well. Queen
only began filming in February, but it seems to be moving quickly enough to
hope that post-production will finish on a similar schedule. It would be nice
to see Egoyan in Toronto with another Canadian film.
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| Photo by Daniel Francis Haber |
Rhymes for Young Ghouls
Canada needs more films like Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Few films bring stories of indigenous
Canadians to the screen and even less of them have told of Canada’s history
with Residential Schools. Rhymes for
Young Ghouls, told in a mix of English and Mi'gmaq, is a tough, gritty tale
of how the schools’ legacy haunts the present generation. Devery Jacobs stars
as Aila, a fourteen-year old girl determined to restore order to her reserve
when her father returns home from prison. Both a revenge drama and a mythical
tale of righting the wrongs of the past, Rhymes
for Young Ghouls could yield one of the biggest discoveries for festival
audiences with their introduction to writer/director Jeff Barnaby.
Stage Fright
Did you feel the urge to kill about partway through Score: A Hockey Musical? If yes, you
might want to see the slasher-musical Stage
Fright, which paints the town red with the campy fun of musical-comedy
kitsch. Score’s Allie MacDonald stars
in this horror comedy about a killer on the loose in a musical theatre camp.
Meat Loaf co-stars as the camp director and Minnie Driver makes a hilarious
cameo as Allie’s mother. The Midnight Madness crowd might want to find the
lyrics to one of the Stage Fright
tunes to get the crowd going as they pass the beach ball before the screening.
That Burning Feeling
Everyone likes to add a fun little sex-comedy into a
festival line-up, right? Last year’s TIFF hit My Awkward Sexual Adventure provided some refreshing humour and
escapism amidst the heavier fare that usually dominates festival programmes,
and the unconventional rom-com That
Burning Feeling could do the same. Dubbed “a romantic comedy about the
least romantic thing,” That Burning
Feeling puts Adam (Paulo Costanzo) on an awkward adventure as he must
confront the lovers/one night stands of his past and see which of his former
lovers gave him a venereal disease. My
Awkward Sexual Adventure’s Emily
Hampshire co-stars as one of Adam’s former flings alongside John Cho (Star Trek into Darkness) and Tyler
Labine (“Breaker High”) in this funny and surprisingly sweet love story. That Burning Feeling marks the
directorial debut of Jason James, who produced the films Repeaters (2010) and Cole
(2009), which screened at the festival.
