The Hot List

Workers gather at Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. (Edward Burtynsky/Mongrel Media)

End of the Line
Subway ride to the apocalypse, anyone? A young Montreal psychiatric nurse, riding home after a lousy day, finds her train stopped in a tunnel; all passengers are brutally murdered except her and a few other (possibly unlucky) survivors. The unpalatable topic of religious fanaticism gets dressed up as a horror movie. “The end is classic Wes Craven or John Carpenter, totally bleak and excellent,” says Jesse Wente, one of the Toronto International Film Festival programmers for Canadian films.

Monkey Warfare
What’s revolutionary these days? Don McKellar and Tracy Wright play musty, aging radicals living off the grid in gentrifying Toronto. When their space is invaded by a sexy pot dealer (Nadia Litz), hipster theory meets explosive action in a tight, kinetic movie — winks at Godard are fun, not pretentious — with something important to say. “I love that this is a classically Canadian credit-card movie, shot for very little money very fast,” says Wente. “A huge breakthrough for director Reg Harkema.”

Brand Upon the Brain!
A Special Presentation evening at the exquisite Elgin Theatre will set this silent film, from Winnipeg’s own avant-avant-garde director Guy Maddin, to live musical accompaniment with sound-effects artists and a narrator. “If there’s one event for people to see at the festival, it’s this one,” says Stacey Donan, another TIFF Canadian films programmer. The black and white faux-autobiography (mockto-biography?) is about a guy named Guy recalling his childhood in an orphanage on the island of Black Notch. “Maddin is the mad genius of world cinema,” says Donen. “Your jaw is going to drop.”

L’Esprit des lieux (The Spirit of Places)
From Quebec director Catherine Martin (who has another anticipated film, Dans les villes, in the festival this year) comes a documentary meditation on the sad trade-off in our rush to urbanize. Martin traces the path taken by photographer Gabor Szilasi who, 30 years ago, shot the vanishing rural lifestyle of the Charlevoix region in Quebec. Revisiting his subjects and the landscape to discover what has changed since — and to unpack the nature of nostalgia — Martin makes what Donen calls “one of the most moving films in the festival. She understands the universal quality of how cultures lose the most significant things over time.”

Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith, left) and his teacher Miss Houston (Vivica A. Fox) in Citizen Duane. (ThinkFilm)

Citizen Duane
“A Canadian version of Election,” says Wente. In his two-stoplight town, teenager Duane Balfour overachieves at losing. He’s a creative failure — to take out a local bully, he designs a “cycle of violence” that literally has two wheels and saws attached to it — who turns his sights to the local mayoral race, which is really just a way of working out his daddy issues. A sweet-natured comedy from Toronto-based Michael Mabbott, director of The Life and Times of Guy Terrifico.

Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi (On the Trail of Igor Rizzi)
A former pro-soccer player (played by French star Laurent Lucas) mourns his ex-girlfriend by wandering a wintry Montreal with a ball tucked under his arm, numbly inching toward a life of crime. This debut French-language feature from director Noel Mitrani has been compared to works by Aki Karismaki (The Man Without a Past), the Finnish master of deadpan. “It’s funny but you’re not sure it’s funny, and you feel almost embarrassed to laugh,” says Wente. “Beautifully made and totally unexpected.”

Tales of the Rat Fink
Although he’s been customizing cars and making model hot rod kits for an underground fan base since the 1950s, American cult hero Ed “Big Daddy” Roth is perhaps best known for designing the anti-Mickey Mouse: a bug-eyed, piranha-toothed character called the Rat Fink. Director Ron Mann (Grass, Comic Book Confidential) is our country’s best guide to the subculture and in this part-animated, part-interview documentary, he paints a portrait of yet another fellow iconoclast whose fans include Jay Leno and John Goodman.

Manufactured Landscapes
A Canadian cultural superstar three-for-one: revered director Jennifer Baichwal (The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia) made her documentary about revered artist Edward Burtynsky using revered cinematographer Peter Mettler, who is also the subject of the festival’s Canadian Retrospective. Burtynsky’s photographs of international industry spiraling out of control take him to China, and Baichwal tags along. “The opening shot is 10 minutes of a huge factory in China. It is absolutely stunning,” says Donen. “She has the sensibility of an artist but is a tough, accomplished documentarian.”

Mercy
“Totally audacious, mesmerizing, playful and odd,” says Wente of this Iranian-Canadian co-production. Shot as if from the surveillance cameras that dot the public spaces in Tehran and narrated by a fairy giant granting wishes — Wente also used the word “experimental” — this debut from Canadian-Iranian director Mazdak Taebi throws Persian mythology into a critique of mass media that sounds like a tripped-out Wings of Desire.

An electronic collar should keep family zombie Fido (Billy Connolly) from getting out of line in the film Fido. (Michael Courtney/TVA Films)

Fido
In the bucolic town of Willard, a corporation called ZomCon has patented an electronic collar to stop the local zombies from living up to their reputation. Little Timmy gets a zombie of his own, but what if the collar malfunctions? “This is a really snappy, fun, movie-movie experience with a big name cast [Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly],” says Donen, “and who doesn’t love a zombie comedy?”

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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