Discover great new Canadian films at the 2019… | Little White Lies

Canada Now Festival

Dis­cov­er great new Cana­di­an films at the 2019 Cana­da Now festival

26 Apr 2019

Words by David Jenkins

Group of four young women, one in foreground appears pensive, others stand behind her in a hallway.
Group of four young women, one in foreground appears pensive, others stand behind her in a hallway.
Porn barons, rebel poets and teen sex­u­al­i­ty are all part of this excit­ing cin­e­mat­ic crop.

Lon­don is the meet­ing point of a UK tour for nine new films hail­ing from Cana­da – col­lec­tive­ly part of the annu­al Cana­da NOW series. It’s a chance to catch up with the rich offer­ings from a coun­try that has giv­en us David Cro­nen­berg, Atom Egoy­an, Denis Vil­leneuve and Xavier Dolan. There’s even a new work by vet­er­an actor and occa­sion­al direc­tor, Don McKel­lar, in the mix – called Through Black Spruce. So here’s a lit­tle pre­view of the sto­ries you can catch among this year’s diverse and engag­ing line-up.

If you, like us, are suf­fer­ing severe with­draw­al symp­toms from Twin Peaks, then you’ll be able to hang with Agent Dale Coop­er a lit­tle longer if you head along to Kei­th Behrman’s Giant Lit­tle Ones. It’s a film which not only asks the ques­tion, do you know where your kids are, but also, what very bad things are they prob­a­bly up to. The film sees Franky (Josh Wig­gins) being forced to address and defend his sex­u­al­i­ty after a drunk­en prank goes hay­wire, and his sep­a­rat­ed par­ents Ray (MacLachlan)and Car­ly (Maria Bel­lo) are forced to address the fallout.

A crowd of people in formal attire gathered in an indoor setting, captured in a sepia-toned image.

Chances are if you catch a friend flick­ing through a copy of Play­boy mag­a­zine, they’ll claim that they bought for the arti­cles and not the images. And it’s true – it was, for a time, a paragon of high-end enter­tain­ment jour­nal­ism and lib­er­al polit­i­cal com­men­tary. Hugh Hefner’s After Dark: Speak­ing Out in Amer­i­ca is a doc­u­men­tary from Brigitte Berman which focus­es on the porno tycoon we love to hate, specif­i­cal­ly unearthing the episodes of two ear­ly-six­ties TV pan­el shows – Playboy’s Pent­house’, and Play­boy After Dark’ – and how he dealt with the social issues of the day.

26 April, 6:30pm, Cur­zon Soho

The anx­i­ety and hor­ror of some­thing bad hap­pen­ing to a friend or rel­a­tive, and you were pow­er­less to help. This is the crux of Patri­cia Rozema’s black­ly com­ic dra­ma Mouth­piece, as trou­bled writer Cas­san­dra slumps drunk­en­ly as her moth­er pass­es away from a stroke. The twist is that Cas­san­dra is played simul­ta­ne­ous­ly by two dif­fer­ent actors: Norah Sada­va and Amy Nos­t­bakken, who also wrote the play upon which the film is based. This light­ly exper­i­men­tal film is about woman wrestling with self-expres­sion and strug­gling to deal with trauma.

27 April, 7:30pm, Cur­zon Soho

A young person wearing a furry hat with long, dark hair.

The actor and direc­tor Don McKel­lar is like­ly known to UK audi­ences for his laud­ed apoc­a­lypse dra­ma Last Night from 1998, and hav­ing direct­ed var­i­ous fea­tures and TV episodes in the inter­im, he’s now back behind the cam­era for Through Black Spruce, an adap­ta­tion of an acclaimed 2008 nov­el by Joseph Boy­den. The sto­ry cen­tres on a miss­ing Cree girl and the attempts made by her sis­ter to find her, trav­el­ling between urban and rur­al loca­tions and uncov­er­ing a dark his­to­ry of sex­ism and bigotry.

Cin­e­ma is awash with the sto­ries of strug­gling artists and the tumul­tuous lives they lead, but direc­tor Yan Giroux offers a neat twist, but shift­ing the focus towards those in close orbit of this crazed cre­ator. For Those Who Don’t Read Me is loose­ly based on the life of the late Québé­cois poet Yves Boisvert, and shows how his strug­gle for inspi­ra­tion effect­ed his girl­friend and her young son. It’s a film which explores the respon­si­bil­i­ties of peo­ple liv­ing in soci­ety, ver­sus the more way­ward desires of an artist in search of a muse.

27 April, 1:00pm, Cur­zon Soho

Cana­da Now runs from 24 – 28 April in Lon­don, and tours the UK from 1 July. canadanow​.co​.uk

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