Sarah Polley, Stories We Tell
A mix of commercial choices and art-house darlings have been selected as the year's top 10 Canadian films by a jury assembled by the Toronto International Film Festival.
The 2012 list includes some obvious picks including Sarah Polley's well-received family documentary Stories We Tell and Deepa Mehta's much-heralded but uneven adaptation of the Salman Rushdie novel Midnight's Children, as well as the apocalyptic Cosmopolis by veteran David Cronenberg and the transgender drama Laurence Anyways by the precocious Xavier Dolan.
At the most commercial end of the spectrum, the list includes Michael Dowse's hockey comedy Goon; on the more serious side, it recognizes two documentaries, Peter Mettler's hallucinatory The End of Time and Nisha Pahuja's provocative The World Before Her, about women in India.
The list also includes Kim Nguyen's Rebelle, a drama about child soldiers in Africa; Still, Michael McGowan's drama about a man fighting to build a house for his ailing wife; and Sean Garrity's romantic comedy My Awkward Sexual Adventure.
A festival of these films, along with the top 10 short films selected, runs at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Jan. 4 to 13.