The Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) celebrated its twentieth anniversary by reminding everyone what it means to celebrate Canadian film. The festival’s platinum anniversary was love letter to the devoted “Francophiles” in its audience. WIFF shows more French-language movies than any other film festival in Canada, and there’s a faithful core of regulars taking in the Quebecois films that are often impossible to see even in cinematically saturated cities like Toronto. WIFF may have Oscar hopefuls like Maria, Conclave, and The Substance drawing crowds, but the Canadian films are its stars.
If WIFF opened with the Frenchest movie ever last year with The Taste of Things, which ended up being my favourite film of 2023, the smartly curated fest proved that it knows its audience well by kicking off with Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds (Bergers). This Quebecois film set in the French Alps perhaps rivals the French-ness of The Taste of Things with its fusion of Parisian and provincial dialect as Deraspe adapts Mathyas Lefebure’s memoir about quitting the Montreal rat race in favour of a pastoral life. Winner of Best Canadian Feature at TIFF earlier this year, Shepherds got the festival off to a strong start by again catering to cinephiles who enjoy Francophone cinema with a side of lamb.
The film energetically observes as Mathyas (Félix Antoine-Duval, Saint-Narcisse) tries to prove himself a worthy apprentice. His foundational shepherding gigs don’t offer the peaceful life he imagined, though. Shepherding is tough work. Doubly so with the boorish and abusive shepherd who agrees to show him the ropes. But Shepherds finds great serenity when Mathyas escapes a hectic life once again and the film’s two-act structure brings the aspiring shepherd to a gig leading a herd to graze in the Alps. Antoine-Duval’s compelling, introspective performance avoids romanticizing the pastoral life, too. It’s a turn that wears the physical and emotional toll of the job well as Mathyas gradually earns the authority a shepherd commands with his flock. Gorgeously lensed by Vincent Gonneville, Shepherds proves refreshingly therapeutic as Mathyas finally finds serenity in the openness of the mountainside. This is Deraspe’s best film yet—a breath of fresh air.
Shepherds set the bar for the Canadian films to come at WIFF and the ten films in competition are worthy of the distinction. WIFF draws a mix of favourites from the circuit and hidden gems overlooked by giants like TIFF and VIFF. For example, WIFF’s 2024 competition boasts three films that might be unfamiliar even with cinephiles keeping pace with CanCon. On Earth as in Heaven, directed by Nathalie Saint-Pierre; Hunting Daze, directed by Annick Blanc; and Lucy Grizzli Sophie, directed by Anne Émond all mark worthy spotlights with WIFF’s appreciative Francophiles.
On Earth as in Heaven, for one, offers an evocative coming-of-age story with Saint-Pierre’s exploration of faith and sisterhood. It explores an awakening as Clara (Lou Thompson) ventures beyond her family’s secluded religious commune in search of her elder sister, Sarah (Philomène Bilodeau), who escaped its suffocating emphasis on the denial of all earthly pleasures. Clare lands in Montreal and finds an ally in her estranged aunt (a terrific Édith Cochrane), who puts on a brave face but has her own struggles with alcoholism and men she likens to salt-n-vinegar chips. (“Once the bag’s open, I can’t help myself,” she admits.)
Earth, much like Shepherds, finds catharsis through a change of scenery. However, Saint-Pierre inverts the rural/pastoral trop. Clara manages to pause and find herself amid the noisy hustle-bustle. Saint-Pierre shrewdly lets her confidence in her young ingénue drive the film: whether cycling through the city or letting Clara discover herself in a mirror, a world of drama plays out on Thompson’s face. Thompson’s subtle performance—a revelatory breakthrough turn from the newcomer—invites the audience along for Clara’s journey of self-discovery as she realises that it’s not worth sacrificing one life, however short it may be, for the promise of another for eternity.
Where On Earth as in Heaven escapes the woods, Blanc’s Hunting Daze wades deeper into them. This frenetic film trudges into the forest alongside Nina (Antigone’s Nahéma Ricci) as she joins a hunting party of extremely shady men. The group becomes extra boisterous when the final member of the hunting party arrives with an unexpected guest: an undocumented migrant worker. Things spiral out of hand quickly after Nina passes the boys’ first “initiation.” The new arrival sends the white wolves into a frenzy and a prized buck is only one of the beasts bagged by gunfire, so to speak.
Hunting Daze spins the girl-in-peril trope on its head as Nina endeavours to survive the booze-fuelled bloodsport. It’s a chaotic affair—intentionally so—with kinetic cinematography and elliptical storytelling that oscillates between reality and nightmare. The woozy nature of Nina’s fight does mean that Hunting Daze frequently proves elusive, but it nevertheless marks Blanc as a bold talent to watch.
Once a talent to watch herself after striking early works like Our Loved Ones (Les êtres chers), Anne Émond again proves that she’s living up to expectations. Her fifth feature, Lucy Grizzli Sophie, leaves a strong impression. It’s an intriguing another character piece that sees a woman struggling with addiction and a setting that serves up something sinister amid the familiar comforts of rural life.
A ferocious performance by Catherine Anne-Toupin, whose own play gets adapted her, gives audiences a morally ambiguous heroine in Sophie. She arrives a Quebec bed and breakfast while running from her past. Sophie’s slight Marion Crane vibes rise further to the surface as life in the B&B includes an elderly matron (Lise Roy) and her borderline-creepy son (Guillaume Cyr). But this film also favours the unexpected as fates collide in a dangerous morality play that will have audiences guessing to the end.
The film illustrates the shrewd curation of the competition as the Canadian titles complement one another in unexpected and often subtle ways. These three hidden gems have loose thematic and narrative overlaps, which distinguish them as three films worthy of being in dialogue with one another in the festival’s conversation about Canadian films. As with Earth and Hunting, Lucy Grizzli Sophie feels curiously under-valued on the Canadian scene—all three of these films should have had better presence on the circuit, so the WIFF spotlight is welcome.
Among the festival circuit favourites, though, it’s hard to fault WIFF for giving a slot to Canada’s Oscar bid Universal Language. Matthew Rankin’s Winnipeg-set Persian comedy truly is the most original film of 2024, Canadian or otherwise. It’s absolutely hilarious and it doubles down on Rankin’s panache for going totally gonzo.
After telling a slice of Canadiana in an expressionist world with The Twentieth Century, Rankin further embraces the strange here while rooting the farce in reality.
Universal Language offers an ingeniously funny consideration of the Canadian mosaic and the fallacy of the “Two Solitudes” as Montrealer Matthew (Rankin) returns home to the ’peg, while Legault-loving bureaucrats conspire about winning over the Rest of Canada. Rankin imagines a Winnipeg settled by a Persian community, a land where everyone orders double-doubles in Farsi at the local Tim Horton’s and splendid turkeys gobble amid beige buildings and circuitous off-ramps. Deftly juggling locations and languages with well-timed comedic beats, this remarkably life-affirming fable reminds a viewer that there’s no place like home—if “home” is ever a destination to which one can return. It’s the ugliest, dreariest portrait of Winnipeg ever put to film, but also perhaps the most inviting.
No stranger to risks and risqué material, either, is Sook-Yin Lee. She makes her third outing as director with Paying for It. This frank study sexuality sits comfortably within her diverse oeuvre. Rankin’s The Twentieth Century star Dan Beirne brings cartoonist Chester Brown to life in this raw dramatization of his memoir about engaging the services of sex workers after his girlfriend (Emily Lê) confesses that she wants an open relationship. Lee, as with her previous films like Year of the Carnivore and her performance in Shortbus, offers a portrait of sexuality that strips back eroticism.
This is a consideration of sex work told with a non-judgemental eye for the factors that drive one’s desire for connection, whether in an emotional spark or splash of friction billed by the hour. The mature performances by Beirne and Lê do the heavy lifting here and Lee is smart enough to let their emotional nakedness guide the journey.
Perhaps the bravest year, though, comes in my favourite film of the competition, Really Happy Someday. The directorial debut from J. Stevens features an extraordinary turn by Breton Lalama as Z. In a stroke of art and life working in tandem, Really Happy Someday invites audiences into Z’s life roughly one year into his transition. Z finds himself at a crossroads, though, as his transition disrupts his rising career in musical theatre: taking testosterone inevitably means that his voice changes. He can’t hit the notes he used to. Lalama lets audiences witness his own transition in real time: his voice cracks and Z’s timbre breaks. Really Happy Someday offers a striking metaphor for what it means to find one’s voice anew.
Stevens skilfully lets this documentary-like element guide the film as every carefully composed frame respects the changes in their star’s physique and spirit, all the while delivering something akin to a Boyhood of a trans experience. This is an assured introduction to two distinct voices on the Canadian film scene, and a welcome window into an experience that is increasingly politicized and attacked. The vulnerability on display here, the disarmingly personal invitation to see a journey of self-discovery and self-love through one person’s eyes, frankly, makes Really Happy Someday as significant socially as it is artistically. It’s a film that invites people to be seen, but also to see others anew as their authentic selves.
Again echoing WIFF’s sensibility to programme films in conversation with one another, Stevens’ film sits in good company with the extraordinary documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s ingenious portrait of a trans trailblazer. The documentary offers a creative take on the life and music of Jackie Shane, who turned heads in the Toronto music scene in the 1960s and broke ground as an out and Black transwoman. The film tells how Shane retreated from public life shortly after hitting her stride, though, and this facet of the story means there’s inevitably minimal material with which one can share her biography visually.
However, the film builds upon a series of audio interviews that Mabbott conducted with Shane shortly before her death in 2019, and brings her to life in animation—which get a vital punctuation mark in the only known archival clip of her performing. The filmmakers let contemporary voices honour Shane’s memory, too, as a new generation of gender-diverse Canadians speak to the doors Shane opened. If there’s a master stroke to the film’s construction, though, it’s in the stirring metaphor of the animation. This is a portrait of trans visibility, or the absence of it, and a welcome way of honouring one woman who boldly stepped into the spotlight.
Joining Any Other Way to represent documentary in the competition, meanwhile, is Russians at War. WIFF valiantly forged ahead with screenings after (bullshit) protests by people who hadn’t seen the film derailed its TIFF premiere earlier this year. The doc directed by Anastasia Trofimova drew a scant handful of protesters in Windsor’s downtown core, but generally found itself the topic of productive conversations inspired by films—in short, facilitating exactly the kind of conversations that festivals should be inviting by screening works that challenge and provoke.
Russians at War isn’t an easy watch by any measure as Trofimova goes to the front lines of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and captures the offensive from the perspectives of Russian soldiers tasked with doing Putin’s dirty deeds. But this isn’t a flattering or favourable portrait of Russia’s operations by any measure. It’s a profoundly unsettling snapshot of disarray and disillusionment as Trofimova observes the corrosive forces that implore the soldiers to ask why they fight. In some cases, the question inspires them to leave. In others, they become emboldened by their own blindness to reality. But they’re all united by a collective desire to be done with the dirty war. There’s no beauty here. Only bloodshed.
The question of war and what it’s good for, meanwhile, is at the heart of the unexpected winner of the $25,000 WIFF Prize in Canadian Film, Who Do I Belong To?, directed by Tunisian-Canadian filmmaker Meryam Joobeur. The director’s feature debut continues the story established by her Oscar-nominated short drama Brotherhood, which observes the fracturing of a family as two sons go off to war. Joobeur considers the horror of a family reunion, though, when only one son returns. Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) gives his mother, Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui) a bittersweet homecoming that includes a mysterious bride (Dea Liane).
Joobeur unfolds the drama in a series of enigmatic dreams and stark, often viscerally painful waking scenes that feel increasingly detached from reality. Moreover, as Aïcha forces herself to confront the violence of her son’s past, Joobeur lengthens the ellipses between the narrative fragments. Something admittedly gets lost in the shuffle, though. Who Do I Belong To? becomes almost unintelligibly ambiguous. It’s impossible to follow and piecing it together becomes a near-hopeless effort. If WIFF competitors Hunting Days and Sharp Corner (more on that in a second!) are elusive, this film can easily slip through one’s fingers.
However, in processing these fragments of a past informed by trauma, one gets an impression of the scars that Joobeur seeks to examine. Alternatively a ghost story and anti-war fable, the film nevertheless marks Joobeur as a talent with a sharp eye, keen visual sense, and a sensitive hand with actors. Admittedly, it inspired one of the best post-screening debates I’ve had with a fellow critic all year.
Offering an altogether different consideration of trauma, finally, is Sharp Corner. This long overdue sophomore feature by Blackbird director Jason Buxton is sick and twisted in the best possible ways. One perversely and uncomfortably watches Josh (Ben Foster) self-destruct while experiencing PTSD. Josh’s seemingly happy life becomes upended when he and his wife, Rachel (Colbie Smulders), buy their dream home on the cheap—only to be nearly decapitated on their first night when a car careens into the tree on their front lawn after taking the titular curve by their house too quickly. Josh becomes obsessed with power he holds as the literal first responder to the drivers unsuspectingly travelling the dangerous curves ahead.
There are echoes of David Cronenberg’s Crash as Buxton gives audiences a great taste for danger. Sharp Corner plays like a snuff film in which the thrill isn’t the kills, but the disconcerting anticipation of them. For all the twisted metal, which looked and sounded great with the new A/V upgrades in Windsor’s Capitol Theatre, the film is surprisingly accessible. Buxton navigates a razor’s edge here without slipping.
Foster gives a truly unique interpretation of his balding dad wrestling with middle-age malaise. His comedic turn lends an off-kilter air to the affair and makes one an accomplice if one goes along for the ride. The performance exists in the realm of the uncanny as Foster embraces dark humour in a film that’s otherwise soberly bleak. Sharp Corner explores the dark side in all of us, while boldly, uncomfortably making audiences witness the pain of others. It’s a film that absolutely has to be talked about—but maybe not on the drive home. But like all the WIFF Canadian films, it’s sure to fuel a good conversation.
