MONTREAL — Jean-Marc Vallée and Philippe Falardeau aren’t the only Quebec directors headed to the Toronto International Film Festival. TIFF announced the Canadian films in this year’s lineup on Wednesday and, as usual, our province is very well represented.
(The TIFF premières of Vallée’s Wild and Falardeau’s The Good Lie, both starring Reese Witherspoon, were announced in July.)
Xavier Dolan will appear both behind and in front of the camera, though not in the same film. The Quebec director, who often acts in his own movies, will present his fifth feature, Mommy, which premièred in competition at Cannes in May (where it won the jury prize) and will be released in Quebec on Sept. 19.
Mommy explores a familiar Dolan theme: the turbulent relationship between a single mother (Anne Dorval) and her explosive teenager (Antoine-Olivier Pilon).
Dolan also stars in Charles Binamé’s The Elephant Song, the highest-profile English-language outing so far for the latter director, whose credits include Séraphin: un homme et son péché and Maurice Richard. The Elephant Song co-stars Catherine Keener and Bruce Greenwood.
Released in Quebec earlier this year to mixed reviews, Denys Arcand’s Le règne de la beauté will get its Toronto première at the festival. Dolan, Binamé and Arcand’s films will be screened in TIFF’s Special Presentations section.
Stéphane Lafleur’s coming-of-age film Tu dors Nicole, which premièred at Cannes and will be released in Quebec on Aug. 22, screens in TIFF’s Contemporary World Cinema section.
Jacob Tierney follows up his 2009 comedy The Trotsky (starring Jay Baruchel) with Preggoland, starring Sonja Bennett as a 35-year-old who fakes pregnancy in order to fit in with her friends. James Caan plays her father, while Danny Trejo and Paul Campbell appear in minor roles.
The National Film Board boasts several Quebec titles at TIFF, including veteran aboriginal filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s Trick or Treaty?, about the present-day debate over a 1905 land treaty; Montrealer Paul Cowan and Palestinian animator Amer Shomali’s The Wanted 18, revisiting the town of Beit Sahour’s efforts to establish an independent dairy industry during the First Intifada; Oscar winner Torill Kove’s autobiographical short Me and My Moulton; and Denis Poulin and Martine Époque’s innovative dance film CODA.
Harold Crooks (who co-directed the 2011 documentary Surviving Progress) returns with La face cachée de l’impôt (The Price We Pay), looking at corporate corruption and tax avoidance.
Mathieu Denis, co-director of the arty 2011 film Laurentie, explores a recent hot topic in Quebec cinema with Corbo: the history of the FLQ. The film tells the story of Jean Corbo, who joined the militant organization in 1966, at age 16, and died in a bombing at a Dominion Textile factory in St-Henri.
Maxime Giroux (Jo pour Jonathan) presents his third feature, Félix et Meira, exploring a love story between a Québécois man and a married Hasidic woman. Rodrigue Jean continues to look at male prostitution in Montreal with L’amour au temps de la guerre civile, starring Alexandre Landry (Gabrielle).
Landry is one of this year’s TIFF Rising Stars, along with fellow Quebec actor Sophie Desmarais, Winnipeg’s Julia Sarah Stone (who starred in Montrealer Tara Johns’s 2011 film The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom) and Toronto’s Shannon Kook.
