Though funding agencies are pushing for a more commercial agenda, leading Canadian filmmakers appear to be sticking to their non-commercial guns. That's the superficial impression from this year's Canadian Top 10 film list, picked by a jury selected by the Toronto International Film Festival.
Neither the top-grossing film in the country last year, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, nor the most expensive Canadian film, the $11-million zombie comedy Fido (which has yet to open theatrically), made the cut.
The Top 10 films include three documentaries about the environment, one feature film mostly in the Inuktitut language (Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's The Journals of Knud Rasmussen) and dramas about Alzheimer's disease (Sarah Polley's feature directing debut, Away from Her) and political radicalism (Reginald Harkema's Monkey Warfare).
Also on the list are three comedies, including Mike Clattenburg's Trailer Park Boys: The Movie and, from Quebec, Philippe Falardeau's picaresque father-son story, Congorama, and the deadpan Sur la trace D'Igor Rizzi, the first film from Toronto-born, French-raised Noël Mitrani, also about a displaced European (French actor Laurent Lucas) in contemporary Quebec.
The third Quebec film, Une dimanche à Kingali, based on Gil Courtemanche's novel, revisits the 1994 Rwandan genocide from the perspective of a Quebec documentary filmmaker.
The three documentaries about the environment include: Gary Burns and Jim Brown's meditation on suburbia, R adiant City (the only entry from Western Canada), Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, which follows environmental photographer Ed Burtynsky in China, and Sharkwater, Rob Stewart's film about sharks.
Both Polley's yet-to-open Away from Her, based on an Alice Munro short story, and Manufactured Landscapes will make their U.S. debuts at next month's Sundance Film Festival.
In a statement issued before Tuesday night's announcement of the Top 10 list, TIFF director Piers Handling said: "This year has been phenomenal for Canadian cinema both critically and commercially.
"The diversity of genres and subjects featured in Canada's Top 10 highlight the extraordinary filmmaking talent in this country."
This year's 10-member jury included no film critics and only one film journalist, Manon Dumais from Voir Montréal. Other jurors included freelance producer Lorraine Clark, programmers Helen du Toit and Marguerite Pigott, filmmakers Thom Fitzgerald, Aubrey Nealon and Jean-Marc Vallée, and producers David Hamilton, Liz Jarvis and Raymond Massey.
Liam Lacey