TIFF 2024: The Québec Connections
by Maurie Alioff – Québec Correspondent
(September 16, 2024 – Montréal, QC) For the CBC’s Jackson Weaver, TIFF 2024 was owned by Canadian and Quebec selections. Weaver wrote that while big names like Angelina Jolie, Elton John and Gabrielle Union stirred up Toronto, the festival “ended up with a slightly different focus. Instead of buzzy box office smashes, TIFF this year has been more about local talent and Canadian success — with a considerable number of homegrown films dominating conversation.” The Canadian movies the festival programmed are varied and often, as they always have – in David Bowie’s words – “turn and face the strange.”
Slotted in as a Special Presentation, Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds (Bergers) is a follow-up to the moviemaker’s 2019 picture, Antigone, which world–premiered TIFF that year and won the Canada Goose Award for best Canadian Feature. It made decent box office, and was Canada’s submission to the Oscars Best International Feature Film category.
At TIFF 2024’s end, the festival announced that Derapse once again picked up the Best Canadian Feature prize, this time for Shepherds.
Like Antigone, which updates Sophocles’ tragedy, Shepherds depicts a convention-breaking character who veers into potentially challenging behaviour. Mathyas (Félix-Antoine Duval), a Montreal copywriter feeling vacancy in his life, re-settles in southern France and becomes a shepherd who must deal with hundreds of animals. He and his new lover (Solène Rigot) face dramatic and comic hurdles in their transition from urban to an idyllic, but demanding countryside. As an ex-copywriter who in my twenties did exactly the same thing in a couple of countries populated by many sheep and goats, I can relate. I didn’t herd animals, just chatted with them. Deraspe’s film, made in Provence, is as visually sumptuous as a movie it recalls: Jean-François Pouliot’s La Grande Séduction, re-made as Don McKellar’s Seducing Dr. Lewis.
A reviewer says of Shepherds that the film “doesn’t just show this straight couple getting better at a job that isn’t for amateurs, as it also shows the not so glamorous part of an unglamourous job – the part involving death. Most viewers comfort themselves within binaries – rural is heaven, urban is hell.” During a 2019 TIFF interview, Deraspe emphasized to me that she prioritizes human values and love in films that play with style and form. Shepherds is scheduled to open in Québec on November 15.
In another city to country movie, Kaniehtiio Horn’s Seeds, Ziggy (Horn herself, pictured above) is a native woman who heads back to her origins in a rural reservation. The narrative driver involves a menacing agricultural corporation that is interfering with her people. Nature’s Oath, the company’s name an obvious dig at the whole food and wellness industry, plans to steal her family’s precious seed supply. The implications of aggression against Indigenous People are obvious. Ziggy takes on the role of protector in a potentially violent situation.
Horn, also an actor (Reservation Dogs), has a personal backstory rooted in native culture, history, and activism. Her formative years were on the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve near Montreal. Her mother, Kahntineta Horn, like filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, was in her youth a model who became an activist fighting for her people. She, her mother, and her half older sister Waneek protested in Oka during the violent 1990 standoff with Quebec Provincial Police and the Canadian army. Waneek was holding four-year-old Kaniehtiio when a soldier stabbed her in the chest with a bayonet. Seeds tells a story that comes from a deep well of experience and outrage. Seeds is scheduled to open October 25.
Two Winnipeg filmmakers with links to Quebec, Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin, were highlighted at TIFF 2024 and made an onstage appearance together. In 2019, Rankin’s The Twentieth Century, an ultra-mock historical film that I called “a wacky clown car ride into the psyche of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as a young man,” got named best First Feature at TIFF. After world premiering in Toronto, it also took the Festival du nouveau cinéma’s most promising feature film prize in its National Competition, and made TIFF’s 2019 Canadian Top Ten list.
This year, Rankin’s equally nutty new film, Universal Language took another award: Best Canadian Discovery, and it will represent Canada in the nomination process for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards. It won the newly established audience award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.
Rankin has enjoyed living in Montreal and being connected to the province’s film industry, getting to know moviemakers like Denis Côté. Adventurous Sylvain Corbeil, who produced some of Côté’s films, not to mention Xavier Dolan’s stunning Mommy, handled Universal Language.
In Universal Language, Rankin links his native Winnipeg to Quebec with his customary deadpan dream humour. For some reason, Winnipeg has become a Persian city where Farsi is the language of speech, Tim Horton’s signs, and high school names. Playing with this transformation, Rankin alludes to highly regarded Iranian movies like The White Balloon,” directed by the absurdist and rebel against the Islamist state, Jafar Panahi.
The movie focuses on Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), a guide who brings tourists to preposterously banal Winnipeg “landmarks,” like an overpass, a lost briefcase, a broken down fountain. Meanwhile Matthew (Ranking himself), a Quebec government drone, shows up in Winnipeg on a quest to solve the mystery of his mother. Meanwhile, a couple of students find Iranian money frozen under a patch of ice. As one review puts it, “Time, geography and identities crossfade, interweave and collide into a surreal comedy of misdirection.”
It doesn’t portray Winnipeg or Quebec City in a particularly flattering light. Back in 2019, Rankin told me during an interview that Canadians take comfort in “little stories we tell ourselves to confirm we are good and righteous in everything that we’re doing. That’s really strange, pathological, hypocritical and possibly sinister.”
As for Rankin’s brother-in-crazed cinema, Guy Maddin, he was at TIFF 2024 with his first feature since 2017’s The Green Fog. The new picture Rumours was also co-directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson.
Maddin popped into focus in the late 1980s, carving out an esoteric field of play that over the years yielded brilliantly managed, often hilarious movies like Tales of Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, and The Saddest Music in the World. At first he worked closely with writer George Toles and producer Greg Klymkiw, close friends who share his love of funhouse narratives and droll humour. Maddin perfected the deployment of feverish melodramatics and evocations of early sound moviemaking, complete with scratchy, hissing and popping soundtracks
Guy Maddin’s Rumours, while loaded with off-kilter narrative lines and strange eruptions, is his biggest step toward more stylistic linear “normalcy.” Before TIFF he joked with a journalist: “The idea is to get 12 or 13 Oscars — or at least the noms — so that would have meant a slight tweak of the dial from my previous work. But luckily, this is a script that demanded such dial-turning anyway. Do they do with the Oscars what they do with the Stanley Cup here in Canada? You go to your hometown and you drink out of them?” Rumours benefits from some big name involvement. Horror auteur Ari Aster (Midsommar and Hereditary) produced, and Oscar winning Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander highlight the cast.
Quebec vedette Roy Dupuis appears as a Justin Trudeau-like and very horny Prime Minister of Canada in Rumours. In Maddin’s version of a political satirical drama, one that goes berserk of course, the story pinpoints the leaders of the First World during the annual G7 summit in Germany (filmed in Hungary). German chancellor Hilda Ortmann, a take on Angela Merkel played by Blanchett, hosts near a dark forest no doubt meant to invoke The Brothers Grimm.
During a luxurious dinner that precedes discussions about an unspecified world crisis, staff members vanish, phones stop working, and the town is gone. The world leaders are on their own, except for 2,000-year-old former people that were embalmed in clay but now live again as masturbating zombies. Masturbating with a purpose of course.
“This is a very strange film,” wrote The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “like a mixture of George A Romero with a crimeless, detectiveless Agatha Christie, and maybe TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.” Rumours is scheduled to open October 18.
TIFF’s runner up prize for its Best Canadian Discovery prize went to You Are Not Alone (Vous n’êtes pas seuls), directed by long-time couple, Marie-Hélène Viens and Philippe Lupien. The jury stated it is a film “that entranced us with its outstanding performances, meticulously constructed tone, and wonderfully fresh approach to genre.”
The genre is sci-fi mixed with romance. The story revolves around Léo (Pier-Luc Funk), a pizza delivery boy who is unhappy with his isolated life. Via an enigmatic cab driver, Léo meets Rita (Marianne Fortier), who is drawn to him. Unfortunately, there is a triangular aspect to the situation. An alien (François Papineau) is also drawn to Léo precisely because the pizza boy is isolated. For one reviewer, the film recalls P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which men get smitten by an apparently human seductress (Scarlett Johannsen) who leads them into a terrifying limbo.
Before TIFF began, Viens recalled that in their younger days, both she and Lupien were excited by “theories and stories about extraterrestrials. … Later, we realized that what truly interested us was the parallel between the loneliness of an individual on Earth and the loneliness of the human race in the universe. The more we thought about this, the more we felt like two tiny ants adrift in a boundless ocean of darkness and unimaginable void.” Vous n’êtes pas seuls is scheduled to open October 18.
I am very curious about Montreal filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel, Bonjour Tristesse. Otto Preminger’s 1958 version stirred feathers at the time for its insinuations of taboo sex and was stirringly Ooo la la with its widescreen vistas of beautiful people on the French Riviera. Above all, there was Jean Seberg, post Preminger’s Saint Joan and just before her New York Herald Tribune girl in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
In Chew-Bose’s debut feature, Seberg’s character Cécile gets played by Lily McInerny. Her womanizing father Raymond, David Niven in an indelible role, is now incarnated by Claes Bang. It’s a long, hot summer on the French Riviera. Raymond’s lover Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune) is young enough to be Cécile’s sister. Complications arise when her late mother’s friend (Chloë Sevigny) shows up.
Does Chew-Bose’s version of the story match up to the sensual allure of Preminger’s? According to a review, “This movie is an ethereal feast for the eyes and ears but, beyond that, a meaningful rumination on what it means to be a woman at different stages of life.”
Not a Canadian made picture, Paul Schrader’s latest Oh, Canada had a strong impact with its story about an aging Vietnam draft dodger (Richard Gere), who has been an activist documentary filmmaker in Canada, and harbours secrets like other recent Schrader protagonists.
One of TIFF 2024’s big surprises was a onetime, non-Red Carpet, but Roy Thompson Hall, screening of The Apprentice. Canadian produced, the movie tracks how mendacious lawyer Roy Cohn programmed the young Donald Trump into becoming the say anything, never back down casebook domination case he is today. The film also delves into the rape charges his wife Ivana once levelled at him. Director Ali Abbasi, who appeared at the screening, talked about distribution problems complicated by Trump’s Cease and Desist legal action.
And then in a weird coincidence, on TIFF 2024’s final day, another apparent assassination attempt on the ex-president’s life.
Maurie Alioff is a film journalist, critic, screenwriter and media columnist. He has written for radio and television and taught screenwriting at Montreal’s Vanier College. Affiliated with the Quebec media industry publication, CTVM.Info, his articles have appeared in various publications, including Canadian Cinematographer, POV Magazine, and The New York Times. He is the Québec Correspondent for Northernstars.ca.
