Cast:: Daniel Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Mikhaïl Ahooja,
Year: 2019
Runtime: 90 minutes
Country: Canada
Language: English
Winnipeg’s Matthew Rankin (The Tesla World Light) doubles down on his signature mode of gonzo history films with this bizarro biopic of William Lyon Mackenzie King, which reimagines the former Canadian Prime Minister’s early life as a series of abject humiliations, both professional and sexual.
Critical Notes
"The movie is full of demonstrative acting and self-consciously verbose dialogue..., but other touches underscore the serious critique beneath the heightened silliness." - Kevin Ritchie, NOW Toronto
CANADA, 2019
French w/ English subtitles 109 minutes
Principal Cast: Nahéma Ricci, Nour Belkhiria, Rawad El-Zein, Rachida Oussaada, Antoine Desrochers, Paul Doucet, Nathalie Tanous, Hakim Brahimi, Benoit Gouin, Kathleen Fortin
Gripping, powerful, and of-the-moment, Antigone loosely adapts Sophocles’ Greek tragedy and situates it in contemporary Montreal. The latest from critically acclaimed Québécois writer-director Sophie Deraspe (The Wolves, The Amina Profile) is a compassionate family drama that doesn’t hold back on its indictment of the current refugee and immigrant experience in North America.
Following the murder of their parents, Antigone, her sister Ismène, her brothers Étéocle and Polynice, and their grandmother Ménécée find refuge in Montreal. They live a quiet, modest life in a tiny apartment in a working-class neighbourhood. A straight-A student seemingly destined for greatness, Antigone (masterfully played by Nahéma Ricci in her first leading role) is the glue that holds the family together. Tragedy strikes when Étéocle is wrongfully gunned down by police during the arrest of Polynice, a small-time drug dealer. Motivated by her sense of duty towards her family and fuelled by the memory she cherishes of her dead parents, Antigone decides to jeopardize her own future to preserve that of her family.
Winner of the Canada Goose® Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the 44th Toronto International Film Festival, Antigone
acutely explores familial sacrifice, the burden of responsibility, and the nature of justice with exceptional depth and nuance. Although inspired by a story 2,500 years old, Deraspe’s film is a timely meditation — one that prompts serious reflection on immigrant life in an ostensibly welcoming contemporary Canada.
“The film is an incisive critique of the power imbalance between citizens and immigrants and the hypocrisy of an unjust justice system. It jolts the viewer out of complacency.”
Il Pleuvait des Oiseaux [And the Birds Rained Down]
Director: Louise Archambault
CANADA, 2019
French w/ English subtitles 127 minutes
Principal Cast: Andrée Lachapelle, Gilbert Sicotte, Rémy Girard, Ève Landry, Éric Robidoux, Louise Portal
The latest from Louise Archambault (Film Circuit favourite Gabrielle), adapted from the acclaimed novel by Jocelyne Saucier, is an elegiac and charming meditation on the possibilities of living outside modernity.
As the film opens, we meet three hermits living in cabins in the Quebec countryside, miles from civilization. Tom (Rémy Girard, The Barbarian Invasions, Incendies), Charlie (Gilbert Sicotte, The Salesman), and Ted (Kenneth Welsh, Wet Bum, Adoration) fled society years ago, and have eked out a back-to-the-land existence, selling pot to the closest locals with help from local hotelier Stephen (Éric Robidoux, Love in the Time of Civil War).
But their lifestyle is increasingly endangered by nature, infirmity, and age. Ted collapses from a heart attack. Photographer and researcher Ange-Aimee (Eve Landry) threatens to disrupt their lives when she starts looking for survivors of a catastrophic blaze that happened decades ago, most notably Ted, whose actions during the fire have assumed heroic stature.
And the Birds Rained Down is a tribute to the need to live independently and on one’s own terms — and to those courageous enough to pursue this. (It’s also a cry for respect for people and their choices, regardless of age.) Driven by an astonishing cast boasting some of Quebec’s most esteemed performers — including Andrée Lachapelle, whose career stretches back to 1954 — the film features one of the most beautiful musical moments of the year, when Girard’s ailing musician Tom, coaxed into performing at a nearby club, delivers a soulful and heartbreaking rendition of one of Tom Waits’ best tunes.
“Touching, heartbreaking, and dangerously thought-provoking, And the Birds Rained Down will force you to re-examine your relationship with your- self, the world around you, and the people you love.”
In just two features — TIFF selections Tower (2012) and How Heavy This Hammer (2015) — Kazik Radwanski has emerged as one of the most distinctive young voices in Canadian cinema, with his refreshingly unadorned yet empathic portraits of alienated individuals struggling to keep it together. His latest and best film to date, Anne at 13,000 ft centres on a precarious period in the life of its eponymous Anne, played by an electric Deragh Campbell in one of the year's most staggering performances.
With her best friend Sarah (musician Dorothea Paas), 27-year-old Anne works at a Toronto daycare, where she needlessly bickers with colleagues and is often more interested in fantasizing with the children than in supervising them. For Sarah's bachelorette party, they go skydiving, and Anne seems completely in her element, floating above it all, a true departure from her strained, awkward professional and social interactions (such as the one with new boyfriend Matt, played by filmmaker Matt Johnson). Radwanski's signature hand-held style matches the way Anne fumbles through life. Tight close-ups offer further evidence of Campbell's remarkable, spiky performance, with her character's tremulous shifts in mood and sentiment efficiently portrayed by subtle swings in tone and body language.
Rife with cinematic references, not the least of which is Gena Rowlands' all-out performance in Cassavetes' classic A Woman Under the Influence, Anne at 13,000 ft is raw and unnerving, and a clear evolution in Radwanski's filmmaking. A vivid portrait of volatility, the film provides both clever metaphors and jostling temporal shifts to show the fine line between losing one's ground and wanting, waiting, for one's life to take off.
Principal Cast: Apayata Kotierk, Benjamin Kunuk, Kim Bodnia
For decades, Zacharias Kunuk has been one of the most exciting, dynamic, and innovative filmmakers in Canada, and indeed the world. With Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner — a prize winner at Cannes and voted the best Canadian film of all time in a recent TIFF poll — Kunuk introduced a film language that combined myth, history, and folklore, an approach evi- dent in subsequent films like The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and Maliglutit (Searchers).
His latest, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, hinges on a pivotal 1961 encounter on spring sea ice between the title character (Apayata Kotierk, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and other community leaders and a government emissary (Kim Bodnia, television’s Killing Eve), who has come to ask them to relocate their families to permanent settlements and send their children to school. Kunuk employs approaches he used in the previous films, but there are also elements of cultural comedy in the contrast between pragmatic Inuit and the odd, incomprehensible expectations of the government agent.
Those demands will ultimately carry an enormous gravitas. Behind what seems to the hunters to be the government agent’s incoherent requests is a policy that will mean a fundamental rupture in the lives of Inuit. The real Noah Piugattuk was born in 1900 and lived to be 96 years old. In that time, he saw the decline of traditional practices that had persisted for thousands of years and the creation of a new relationship with the Canadian colonial state. In this one day — and this fateful meeting — Kunuk condenses much about Inuit–settler relations. The emotional and historical layers in the film make it one of his finest works.
“The real-time effect ... is compelling as its languor and its repetitions gradually reveal the deep cultural misunderstanding that is going on.”
Cast:: Ella Ballentine, Ryan McDonald, Olivia Scriven
Year: 2019
100 minutes. Canada. English
The seemingly separate lives of an anxious, disillusioned teen girl and a troubled, alienated man converge fatefully in this haunting exploration of womanhood, isolation, and toxic masculinity, set in 1980s Newfoundland.
Set in suburban Newfoundland in 1987, Nicole Dorsey's debut feature Black Conflux is a dreamy account of two converging lives. Fifteen-year-old Jackie (Ella Ballentine) is navigating from vulnerable adolescence to impending adulthood. Dennis (Ryan McDonald) is a socially inept loner with a volatile dark streak and delusional fantasies of adoring women at his beck and call.
Critical Notes
"A haunting, humane twist on thriller conventions." - Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter
Principal Cast: Kacey Rohl, Amber Anderson, Martin Donovan, Connor Jessup, Thomas Olajide
Directed with an assurance that suffuses every frame, the latest feature from Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis centres on Katie (Kacey Rohl, television’s Hannibal, Sisters & Brothers), a young woman who has become a literal poster child on her university campus: recently diagnosed with cancer, she’s the focal point of an online funding campaign for both herself and other cancer-related causes. The only problem is, it’s all built on a lie: Katie isn’t sick, and never has been. And as her story slowly begins to unravel, she disastrously decides to double down, unable to give up the real-life fantasy world she’s constructed for herself.
Rohl dominates the film with her stunning and superbly textured performance as Katie — who variously comes across as an average young woman, a scared, abandoned little girl, and a Machiavellian schemer — and she’s supported by an amazing cast that includes Martin Donovan (Indian Horse) and Connor Jessup (Closer Monster, Blackbird).
While the film has much to say about social media’s impact on contemporary culture — where compassion and hatred can both burst forth in tsunami-like waves, and where manipulation and falsehood have become the norm — its chief virtue is its insistence that we look at, and empathize with, a protagonist who does the unthinkable. It’s a feat that one rarely sees attempted, let alone succeeded at — but that’s only one of the reasons White Lie is one of the most fearless and emotionally affecting films you’ll see this year.
“Driven by nuanced, persuasive performances and shot with an urgent, jittery tension, White Lie is a compelling close-up character study of a recklessly needy anti-heroine caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making.”
Arabic, English, French w/ English subtitles 101 minutes
Principal Cast: Elia Suleiman, Gael García Bernal
A church in Nazareth with a door that won’t open. A deserted Paris. A New York supermarket with as many guns as fresh produce. In his fifth feature — which garnered a Jury Special Mention at Cannes 2019 — Elia Suleiman, a famed figure in Palestinian cinema, explores the world with his trademark, wide-eyed wonder — one that, here, belies an incisive critique of nationalism and identity.
Suleiman once again stars in his own film, personally investigating the meanings of being in exile and in search of a home. Opening in his native Palestine before moving to Paris and then New York, It Must Be Heaven comprises comedic vignettes, some darker than others. Suleiman embellishes small details in each, his style edging ever closer to the surreal, in an attempt to capture the experience of a perpetual outsider, and to suggest that normality is highly circumstantial — and often absurd. He also points to how biases in the real world are equally present in the film world, as It Must Be Heaven loosely follows Suleiman’s quest to get his film funded with one French producer telling Suleiman his idea “isn’t Palestinian enough.”
With a screen presence that has been compared to Buster Keaton’s, Suleiman lends a detached bemusement to his observation of the minute oddities of daily life — which, when reflected on, reveal so much more than most would like to admit.
“Whimsical and wistful yet infused with a yearn- ing for the stability of place, Heaven will have gates opened throughout the European indie circuit and potentially further afield.”
