An impressive first feature by two recent graduates of Sheridan College’s film program, AMY GEORGE is an acutely observed and refreshingly subtle coming-of-age tale set in Toronto’s east end. At the centre of the story is Jesse (Gabriel del Castillo Mullally), a 13-year-old who harbours dreams of becoming an artist. His ambitions take him in an unexpected direction after he gets the spurious advice that in order to be a true artist, he must make love to a woman.

However, his low-key middle-class milieu is not exactly a great breeding ground for burgeoning Don Juans. His own social awkwardness is another impediment. Having failed to get much useful guidance from his well-meaning bohemian parents – played by writer Claudia Dey and musician Don Kerr – Jesse struggles to sort out his thoughts on sex, a subject that becomes even more complicated when he starts spying into the bedroom of his new neighbour Amy (Emily Henry). Jesse’s rather warped perspective on his romantic endeavours makes it hard to tell whether any of his interest will be reciprocated.

By concentrating more on the small developments in Jesse’s life than any big-picture concerns, writer-directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas craft an engaging and often very funny portrait of adolescence in its most cringe-worthy moments.

-Jason Anderson

One of the best loved works in the history of the Canadian stage makes a successful transition to the screen in this confident adaptation of the musical tribute to the WWI flying ace. Made during the Soulpepper Theatre Company’s triumphant remount in 2009, director Barbara Willis-Sweete’s film captures the show’s two creator-performers in top form.

With John Gray providing musical accompaniment, Eric Peterson delivers a virtuosic performance. A familiar sight to TV viewers thanks to his time on Street Legal and Corner Gas, Peterson stars here as 18 different characters, including Billy, the Owen Sound boy who becomes a legend of the skies, albeit with no little sorrow about the friends he lost in the war.

Much has obviously changed about the production since Peterson and Gray first performed it in 1978. Originally presenting Billy as a young man, it now takes on a more elegiac tone with Peterson now playing him as a senior reflecting on the most tumultuous years of his life. The change adds another layer of poignancy to a play that was already well-enshrined as a Canadian classic. And while adaptations of theatrical works often lose something in the shift between mediums, Willis-Sweete’s film retains all of the original’s vim and vigour.

-Jason Anderson
 

Runs March 1-4, 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Presented in partnership with Modern Fuel

Modern Fuel presents Rachel Kalpana James’s BORDERLINE as an off-site installation in conjunction with KCFF. This is an exciting partnership initiated during the 2011 edition of KCFF, which continues this year to promote new media and experimental work, add to the dynamic cultural scene in Kingston and represent the breadth of artistic activity and cultural diversity in Canada. James’s art practice is inspired by her South Asian heritage, immigrant history and the search for belonging.

BORDERLINE offers a view of the nightly border-closing ceremony that takes place in the few feet between eastern Pakistan at Wagah and northern India at Amritsar. Juxtaposed on a separate screen is a contrasting view of her solitary and surprisingly casual walk across the India/Pakistan border, as permitted by the bittersweet privilege of the right documentation.

After a sojourn into British costume drama with THE YOUNG VICTORIA Jean-Marc Vallée returns to the high-velocity style of C.R.A.Z.Y. (KCFF 2006), the exhilarating coming-of-age drama that became one of Canadian cinema’s great triumphs of the last decade.

A romantic drama that’s sometimes bewildering but always enthralling, CAFÉ DE FLORE displays no shortage of flash as it hurtles through two storylines that initially seem to be unconnected but prove to be intimately intertwined. French icon Vanessa Paradis plays Jacqueline, a working-class hairdresser raising a son with Down’s syndrome in late-’60s Paris. Fiercely devoted to her child to the exclusion of all others, she is wary when the boy begins to move out of her orbit and closer to that of a young classmate.

Meanwhile in present-day Montreal, Kevin Parent stars as Antoine Godin, a jet-set DJ sorting through the emotional fallout of a recent divorce. Though passionately in love with his new girlfriend Rose (Evelyne Broche), Antoine still has a complex bond with Carole (Hélène Florent) due to the history and the children they share.

With its juggling of time schemes and provocative take on matters of love, memory and synchronicity, CAFÉ DE FLORE is formally daring and wildly energetic. With 13 nominations going into the awards ceremony on March 8, Vallée’s stunner leads the field of Genie nominees this year.

-Jason Anderson

A feature debut by Toronto filmmaker Jason Lapeyre, this tightly rendered and admirably nasty thriller begins with a jewel heist that leaves one crook dead and another in police custody.

The task of keeping tabs on the surviving thief seems like a straightforward gig for the officer in charge. Unfortunately, police constable Frances Jane (Zoie Palmer of TV’s Lost Girl) has the rotten luck to be stuck with Eddie Cordero (Ryan Robbins, a regular on the sci-fi series Sanctuary) in a nearly deserted hospital wing, a location that proves to be fortuitous for the bad guys who’ve got a score to settle with Eddie. Let’s just say that dudes like these should never be put in close proximity to sharp surgical equipment. In order to survive the night, the increasingly desperate policewoman must make an uneasy alliance with her captive, a man who turns out to be the least of her problems.

A graduate of Queen’s University’s film program whose CV of recent work also includes producing a short with the help of Guillermo Del Toro, Lapeyre makes an impressive shift to feature filmmaking after a string of successful music videos and short films. The bounty of plot twists and skilled cast of actors – which also includes William MacDonald as the hospital’s most ruthless visitor and Flashpoint’s Sergio DiZio as the heist’s reluctant inside man – ensure that COLD BLOODED maintains a claustrophobia-inducing tension as well as a dark undercurrent of wit.

-Jason Anderson
 

Toronto’s most flamboyant criminal of the 1940s and 1950s, bank robber Edwin Boyd gets the smart, stylish biopic he deserves in this self-assured first feature by Nathan Morlando. The filmmaker spent over a decade developing the project. He even got to know Boyd before he died in 2002, getting firsthand insights into the story of how a WWII vet who dreamed of becoming an actor settled for the role of Canada’s most wanted criminal.

Scott Speedman brings a comparable level of care and dedication to his electric performance as Boyd, who the film introduces as a family man who turns to crime as a means to gain the recognition that eludes him in other aspects of his life. Yet Morlando also conveys the excitement and exhilaration that Boyd derived from his daring heists and outlaw status.

Speedman gets great support from Kelly Reilly as his wife Doreen, Brian Cox as his understandably disapproving father and Kevin Durand, Joseph Cross and Brendan Fletcher as the rest of the notorious Boyd Gang. Speedman and Durand both recently received Genie nominations for their roles, as did co-star Charlotte Sullivan, who’s equally vivid as a woman who relishes her time as a member of the gang’s entourage but whose own feelings of betrayal contribute to their downfall.

Distinguished by its stylistic panache – with Morlando making great use of his Sault Ste. Marie locations, standing in for postwar Toronto – EDWIN BOYD is a crime flick with serious swagger and surprising psychological depth. Lessons in Canadian history don’t come any cooler than this.

-Jason Anderson

The recent recipient of the Jay Scott Prize for emerging talent by the Toronto Film Critics Association, Ingrid Veninger is proving to be one of Canada’s most industrious and gifted new filmmakers. Having made two charming portraits of young characters with ONLY (which she co-directed with Simon Reynolds) and MODRA (which screened at KCFF 2011), Veninger shifts gears with this caustically funny and well-observed story of a self-involved indie director who brings her daughter on a week-long tour of film festivals in Europe.

Veninger spoofs herself by stepping in front of the camera to play Ruby White, a filmmaker who seems far more invested in her work than she is in the lives of her husband and two children. Nevertheless, she’s invited 19-year-old Sara (played by Veninger’s own daughter Hallie Switzer, also the star of MODRA) to serve as her “assistant” during visits to festivals in England and Germany. Relations between the two women start off frosty and get worse after Ruby faces the first of several unenthusiastic audiences for her latest. Little does her mother know that Sara is facing a crisis of her own.

Given what happens on screen, one would hope that the movie’s contents can’t be interpreted as an autobiographical work for Veninger or any member of her family. What can be seen for certain is the director’s skill at eliciting frank, touching and surprising moments both from her fellow actors and from the many people Ruby meets during her (almost) tireless efforts at self-promotion.

-Jason Anderson
 

The director behind such gloriously idiosyncratic cinematic creations as TALES from GIMLI HOSPITAL, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD and MY WINNIPEG, Guy Maddin has described his latest as his first “ghosts-and-gangsters movie.” As if that weren’t a sufficiently impressive achievement, KEYHOLE also rates as one of cinema’s weirdest and funniest takes on Homer’s Odyssey. Of course, there’s plenty of James Joyce in the mix, too, and more than a little Abbott and Costello present in the film’s occasional detours into slapstick and other forms of nuttiness.

Wisely playing it straight as everything around him grows ever more bizarre, Jason Patric is terrific in the role of Ulysses, a gangland boss who holes up with his gang in a mysterious house. Their late-night vigil turns out to be part of Ulysses’ efforts to revisit his past and reconstitute the family he shared in that same house with wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), one of many characters who may actually be deceased. Ulysses’ companions on his quest include a teenage girl who recently drowned to death and a young hostage who may be Ulysses’ own son (not that Dad can recognize him). And did we mention that Hyacinth’s naked father is chained to his daughter’s bed?

Like so many of Maddin’s movies, KEYHOLE plays by its own rules and its own twisted logic. But rarely has Maddin’s brand of surrealism been quite so bewitching, funny or erotically charged.

-Jason Anderson
 

As one inhabitant of this Alaskan village puts it, Kivalina is the “canary in the coalmine” when it comes to the growing impact of global warming on communities all over the world.

Whether it’s the erosion from sea waves or the giant puddles that fill the streets, the big thaw has affected nearly aspect of the life for the Inupiat community on the island. The situation is so grave that the decision to move the entire town to another location has already been approved. But this process has been stymied by politicians and bureaucrats unwilling to really confront the full implications (and the cost) of the crisis.

When villagers launch a lawsuit against the giants of the energy industry, they bring their plight to the world’s attention. But the gesture may be a hopeless one, especially when Kivalina’s fate is further imperiled by new efforts to exploit the surrounding resources.

An incisive yet humane look at a place coping with a nightmare that may soon engulf us all, KIVALINA V. EXXON is the fourth feature-length documentary by Ben Addelman. An Ottawa-born, Montreal-based filmmaker, Addelman gained international renown for DISCORDIA, BOMBAY CALLING and NOLLYOOD BABYLON, three films he co-directed with Samir Mallal for their production company AM Pictures.

The recent winner of the Best Documentary prize at the Whistler film festival, Addelman’s new film is further distinguished by Steve Cosens’ startling cinematography and an eerie score by Montreal musician Tim Hecker.

-Jason Anderson
 

For the inhabitants of a Franco-Ontarian village named Fort-Aimable, it’ll take a miracle to halt the decline of the place they call home. Most of the buildings have been boarded up and/or bought up by a developer looking to replace the town with his own vision of how things should be. Even the church has been sold, though the local congregation has been meeting there on the sly.

While we all know that miracles can come in many forms, no one could’ve predicted that Fort-Aimable’s fortunes may depend on a slippery con man and a beer with some unusual properties.

Returning home to claim what he hopes is a generous inheritance from a deceased relative, François (Marc Marans) is full of big talk about his fabulous life back in the big city. Indeed, he’s been telling his wealthy fiancée many of the same bogus stories. But he gets more interested in the town’s fate when he learns that the impressive fertility and virility of Fort-Aimable’s citizens may be the result of the town’s most cherished beer recipe.

The young maker of the first Franco-Ontarian fiction film in two decades (LE DIVAN DU MONDE, KCFF 2011), director Dominic Desjardins achieves another milestone by crafting the first comedy feature to be made in Ontario that’s spoken entirely in French. With its colorful performances and rustic charm, LA SACRÉE is an affectionate tribute to a little-seen corner of the country, one that has its own special flavour.

-Jason Anderson

Having just become the second Canadian feature in the last two years to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, MONSIEUR LAZHAR marks another step forward for one of our most gifted filmmakers, Philippe Falardeau.

Adapting his script from a play by Evelyne de la Chenelière, Falardeau brings viewers into a Montreal schoolroom where a group of kids struggle to deal with the recent suicide of their teacher. Infact, it is two students – Simon (Émilien Néron) and Alice (Sophie Nélisse) – who discover her body in the film’s spare and shocking opening moments.

Into this difficult situation comes the teacher’s replacement. Played by comedian and playwright Fellag, Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant awaiting the outcome of his application for refugee status. His formal yet friendly demeanour with his students and fellow teachers belies the traumas he has suffered in his own life.

Despite its schoolroom setting, MONSIEUR LAZHAR examines themes that some viewers may have previously detected in Denis Villeneuve’s INCENDIES, its fellow Oscar nominee - indeed, it’s not so surprising that Falardeau’s film was produced by the same team of Luc Dery and Kim McCraw.

The filmmaker also displays the same skill at directing child actors as he did in C’EST PAS MOI, JE LE JURE!, which played KCFF in 2009. Remarkable for its subtlety and humanity, MONSIEUR LAZHAR is richly deserving of the attention and accolades it’s already received in Canada and all over the world.

-Jason Anderson

After a string of acclaimed shorts, Montreal’s Anne Émond makes a provocative feature debut with this searing and sometimes shockingly intimate drama.

Catherine De Léan and Dimitri Storoge play Clara and Nikolai, two strangers who hook up at a steamy, after-after-party in the movie’s opening moments. As a passionate encounter that proceeds from the hallway to the bedroom of Nikolai’s grungy apartment, they begin to reveal more than their bodies to each other. 
Exposing vulnerabilities that usually stay hidden, they trade confessions about their lives, often using the language of beloved writers to express themselves (Hubert Aquin is a particular favourite for Clara).

During this long dark night of the soul (or two souls, to be more precise), the characters come to epitomize their generation’s hunger for a deeper sense of connection. Sex is the easy part for these two – what comes afterward turns out to be far riskier.

It’s thrilling to see Émond take such risks herself. Daring and stylish, NUIT #1 marks her as a formidable new talent.

-Jason Anderson
 

Reception and exhibit followed by screening
with live musical accompaniment by Dr Philip Carli
Screening at 4:00 pm

BACK TO GOD’S COUNTRY was released in 1919 and tells the story of Dolores LeBeau, a woman with an intrinsic connection to nature and animals who lives with her father deep in the Canadian wilderness. In a savage attack, Dolores’s father is murdered. Distraught, she eventually marries and travels with her new husband on a whaling schooner only to come face-to face with her father’s killer.

BACK TO GOD’S COUNTRY was the product of a two-year exclusive contract between Nell Shipman and James Oliver Curwood, a popular author who often set his stories in the Canadian wilderness. The Shipman-Curwood Producing Company was formed and Shipman’s husband and business manager, Ernest Shipman, acting as producer was responsible for securing funding for the film and for marketing it.

Intelligently marketed both in Canada and the United States, the film was one of the most successful Canadian films of the silent period, posting a 300% profit. The film was promoted as distinctively Canadian; a full-page advertisement in Canadian Moving Picture Digest declared, “Your Audiences Have Been Waiting for THIS – IT’S CANADIAN THROUGH AND THROUGH…A Canadian star in a Canadian story by a Canadian author and produced by a Canadian company under Canadian management.” A nude bathing scene featuring Shipman was also heavily promoted with ads asking “Is the nude rude?”

-Alison Migneault

Join academic Kay Armatage for an in depth look at the career and life of Nell Shipman at this year's seminar, Nell Shipman: In Focus.

This year’s program of nine short films is an emotional rollercoaster that zigzags across genres. A recent Genie winner, Lisa Jackson’s musical SAVAGE offers a different perspective on the history of Canada’s residential schools. In Jamie Cussen’s comedy THE BALCONY AFFAIR, two characters in the twilight of their lives find that love is awkward at any age. Using breathtaking animation, Neil Christopher’s COUNTRY OF WOLVES (named Best Canadian Short Drama at ImagineNATIVE 2011) is a folk tale steeped in the supernatural world of Inuit beliefs and religion.

The latest by writer-director Ken Scott is simply one of the most engaging and endearing Canadian comedies in years. A box-office smash in Quebec, it has also proven to be a hardy crowdpleaser far beyond the borders of La Belle Province, winning audience awards at festivals in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and even Palm Springs.

A big reason for its appeal is Patrick Huard – he stars as David Wozniak, a meat-truck driver, soccer enthusiast and chronic underachiever who has drifted into middle age without making much of his existence. His long-suffering girlfriend Valerie (Julie Le Breton) is inclined to agree.

But that assessment is not entirely true – thanks to his frequent donations to a sperm bank in his younger days, David’s actually the biological father of 533 children. Many of them are pursuing a class-action lawsuit to discover his identity.

Unbeknownst to them, David begins to get to know his “kids” with results that will elicit both laughter and tears from viewers of Scott’s film, the veteran screenwriter’s second effort as director after LES DOIGTS CROCHES, KCFF’s closing night film in 2010. An ode to the joys of paternity and community, STARBUCK is as boisterous as it is big-hearted.

-Jason Anderson

Ingenious, exciting and genuinely creepy, this first feature by the Halifax-based team of director Evan Kelly and writer Josh MacDonald has been a sensation on the planet’s circuit of genre-movie festivals. It’s easy to see why, even if descriptions can’t do justice to THE CORRIDOR’s full freakiness.

A cunning hybrid of mind-bending science fiction and grisly horror, THE CORRIDOR is the story of a group of five friends reuniting for a winter getaway at a remote cabin. This is the same site where one pal had a violent mental breakdown years before. Institutionalized for years, Tyler (Stephen Chambers) remains in a mentally fragile state, though he does his best to share the raucous high spirits of the occasion.

But the truth behind that incident is far wilder and weirder than any of them can imagine. It all has something to do with the eerily translucent shape in the woods nearby, an unexplainable phenomenon that has a growing influence on the weekend’s events. Soon enough, the friends’ fun getaway has become something far creepier.

To say anything more would ruin the surprise. But let it suffice to say that not since Vincenzo Natali’s cult hit Cube has a low-budget Canadian thriller done so much with limited means.

-Jason Anderson
 

Like any conflict, America’s ongoing war on terror cannot be fought without creating collateral damage. That fact is dramatically demonstrated by this Genie-nominated film by Thomas Wallner, one of the most accomplished figures in Canada’s documentary community.

THE GUANTANAMO TRAP introduces viewers to several people whose lives were dramatically altered by their experiences as both inmates and overseers at the U.S. Military Prison at Guantanamo Bay. One is Murat Kurnaz, a German Muslim of Turkish heritage who was an inmate for five years – arrested in Pakistan in 2001, he was determined to be an “enemy combatant” at a tribunal that lasted a mere 40 minutes and relied on testimony later deemed to be spurious.

His experience is juxtaposed with that of Diane Beaver, a lawyer and former army officer who drafted the original legal opinion advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques – she would later be viewed as a promoter of torture by her critics and used as a scapegoat by her military higher-ups. Matthew Diaz, a Judge Advocate for the U.S. Navy, suffers an even harsher fate after he leaks the names of Guantanamo inmates. Meanwhile, a maverick Spanish lawyer named Gonzalo Boye tries to build a case that will make the responsible parties accountable for the prison’s culture of abuse.

Deftly interwoven by Wallner and co-writer Manfred Becker, these stories comprise an affecting study of ethics, politics and individual responsibility as they exist in the world created by 9/11.

-Jason Anderson

Join Thomas Wallner (director and screenwriter) and Manfred Becker (screenwriter and editor), the creative team behind THE GUANTANAMO TRAP, at this year's Master Class.

To mark the centennial of Parks Canada, a patriotic cadre of 52 filmmakers and musicians went into the wilds to interact with iconic landscapes across the land. Like the pilot project NATIONAL PARKS PROJECT: GROS MORNE – presented at KCFF 2010 – the resulting mergers of images and sounds could be described as nature films, though they’re like none you’ve ever experienced.

The roster of acclaimed filmmakers involved with these 13 vignettes includes Zacharias Kunuk (THE FAST RUNNER), Catherine Martin (MARIAGES), Peter Lynch (PROJECT GRIZZLY), Hubert Davis (INVISIBLE CITY), Louise Archambault (FAMILIA), Daniel Cockburn (YOU ARE HERE) and Sturla Gunnarsson (FORCE OF NATURE). Such musical luminaries as Sarah Harmer, Cadence Weapon, Shad, Andrew Whiteman, John K. Samson and Melissa Auf der Maur provide the soundtracks.

These intrepid travelers’ interactions with each other and with the parks themselves became determining factors in the works they created. Whether the artistic vision at hand is Stephane Lafleur’s startling nighttime tour of Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan or a surreal excursion through Kouchibouguac in New Brunswick with director Jamie Travis and members of the Toronto band Ohbijou, these films radically reconfigure our typical notions of Canadiana.

-Jason Anderson
 

In an electric, lived-in performance, Samuel L. Jackson stars as Foley, a newly paroled conman ready to put the criminal life behind him. Unfortunately, his past isn’t quite done with him. The son of his former partner has a high-stakes plan and Foley’s going to help him whether he wants to or not.

Making its eagerly awaited Canadian premiere at this year’s festival, director David Weaver’s neo-noir thriller toys with the hallmarks of the genre – an ex-con struggling to go straight, a troubled femme fatale, a vengeful hotshot, a volatile crime boss – and twists them through an edgy rattlesnake of a plot.

THE SAMARITAN is the third feature by Weaver after his 2001 debut CENTURY HOTEL and SIBLINGS, which opened KCFF in 2005. He was also a driving force behind the omnibus film TORONTO STORIES, which played the festival in 2009.

For his most accomplished production yet, Weaver has assembled a top-notch cast that not only includes Jackson but Luke Kirby, Ruth Negga, Gil Bellows, Deborah Kara Unger and two-time Oscar-nominee Tom Wilkinson.

-Jason Anderson

Join David Weaver (director and screenwriter) and Elan Mastai (screenwriter) for an insider's look at the making of THE SAMARITAN in this year's workshop about Writer-Director Collaborations.
 

A man whose name has become synonymous with opposition to the oil industry’s rapacious quest for resources in northern Alberta, Wiebo Ludwig is unafraid to defend his land and his principles. That stance has sometimes put the former preacher on the wrong side of the law. When a mysterious series of pipeline bombings in B.C. began four years ago – incidents not unlike the crimes for which he was convicted in 2001 – Ludwig came under suspicion and visits from the local RCMP constabulary became routine once again.

During this same period, director David York had largely unprecedented access to the Christian fundamentalist community that Ludwig has tried so hard to protect. Frank and sometimes fraught, the dynamic between the filmmakers and Ludwig and his family members adds an additional level of tension to WIEBO’S WAR.

A Genie nominee for Best Feature Length Documentary, York’s fascinating film dispels the myths and misconceptions about one of Canada’s most controversial and enigmatic figures, a man who has been variously portrayed as a dangerous eco-terrorist and a David facing the biggest of modern-day Goliaths.

-Jason Anderson