‘It’s About Making Sure Original Voices Can Be Heard’

Canada lands at Cannes with a mission to shift the conversation — on the Croisette, at least — from the havoc U.S. tariffs could wreak on the global film industry to the benefits of creative collaboration and co-production with Canadian talent and companies.

As recent successes (Matt Johnson’s SXSW Midnighter audience-award winner “Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie”) and this year’s festival and market titles reveal, Canadian filmmakers are twisting horror and comedy into new shapes and reinforcing the country’s historic strongholds of animation and documentary with new ideas. Over the past decade, holistic, regionally focused companies have been springing up and producing auteur films that are redefining what Canadian cinema is. Indigenous Canadian films, creators and companies are a catalyst in this gradual paradigm shift and have become a regular active presence at major festivals and markets.

“We do arthouse cinema in Canada,” says Montreal producer Sylvain Corbeil, whose Metafilms was behind Matthew Rankin’s acclaimed surreal comedy “Universal Language,” winner of last year’s inaugural Directors’ Fortnight audience award. “We don’t live in the U.S, so there’s less pressure from the market, and that allows more freedom for arthouse cinema to express itself in unusual ways.

“In Quebec, we’re the minority in this North American, English-speaking universe, so we have always been defending something specific in our filmmaking,” he says about the French-speaking province. “Your mother tongue shapes your vision of the world.

“But this is not only about language, it’s about making sure original minds and original voices can be heard. It’s not good for the world when only a few big nations are controlling the content.”

Since its founding in 2013, Metafilms has brought films by Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, Denis Côté and Charlotte Le Bon to Cannes, and this year has Montreal writer-director Anne Émond’s sixth film, “Peak Everything,” premiering in Directors’ Fortnight. The edgy comedy stars Patrick Hivon as a hypersensitive, eco-anxious kennel-owner who buys a therapeutic lamp and Piper Perabo as the supplier’s soothing tech support. Indie Sales is handling international sales.

Émond says that inspiration struck while she was sitting in front of her own therapeutic lamp. “I dreamed of the love story between these characters, and as I got less depressed, I started having fun with them. The film became a bit absurd, but it’s also romantic and catastrophic.

“It drives me crazy that we talk about everything except this major issue of global warming,” she says. “And now, we’re talking about the economy and about the armies that have to rearm, and I think, wow, we are doing everything to avoid this super-frightening subject.”

Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s experimental animated feature “Death Does Not Exist,” also premiering in Directors’ Fortnight, explores the specter of violence in a world-shifting fantasy about a young woman who flees into the forest after an attack on wealthy landowners goes horribly wrong.  The story was inspired by the October Crisis (terrorist acts during a period of political turmoil in Quebec in 1970), “Alice in Wonderland” and issues in contemporary Quebec. Dufour-Laperrière says the film is “first and foremost about the impossibility of violence, and yet that impossibility happens in a world where violence exists. It puts these complex questions in context and makes them felt through the image, colors and visual treatment.”

The film, which screens at Annecy, is a co-production between Embuscade Films — the Montreal studio Dufour-Laperrière started with his brother in 2013 — and France’s Miyu Prods., the minority producer. Best Friend Forever is handling world sales, excluding Canada and France.

Alex Boya’s animated short “Bread Will Walk” also bows in Directors’ Fortnight. Martine Frossard’ s animated “Hypersensitive” bows in the short films competition, while Dominic Desjardins and Charlotte Bruneau’s virtual reality animation “The Dollhouse” in the immersive competition.

Canadian projects are well-represented in Frontières Platform, the popular market program co-produced with Canada’s Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Its Buyer’s Showcase includes Montreal illustrator and director Sebastian McKinnon’s buzzy, world-building medieval fantasy “The Stolen Child” (Metafilms and Vancouver’s Cowpi Films), repped by Germany’s Picture Tree Intl.; and Samuel Scott’s indie music, horror sci-fi comedy “Turn It Up!,” from Ontario’s Collingwood Film Co.

The Platform’s Proof of Concept titles include “Feed” by Nancy Urich of Nova Scotia’s Cut/Off/Tail Pictures and “[Métis]Ancestral Beasts,” a psychological horror story from Métis writer-director Tim Riedel, who says he’s showing a six-minute scene to illustrate how the film balances lived experience with genre elements.

“We’re aiming to shoot in the fall and are close to casting a major actor for the key non-Indigenous role — a gruff, isolated character who treats the land as his domain and holds the key to a dark past,” Riedel says. “The role blends harshness with hidden depth — a settler-archetype many Indigenous people will recognize.”

Riedel spent more than a decade documenting underrepresented global issues before shifting his focus back to his homeland. “Now that I’ve got this platform at Cannes, I’m using it to show how powerful Indigenous stories can be — and how far they can go with the right support.”

Filmmaker Rylan Friday, from Cote First Nation, Saskatchewan, is part of the Indigenous Screen Office delegation, which includes producers Paula Devonshire, Cody Lefthand, Gail Maurice and Tanya Talaga. His feature project “Terror/Rising” expands his 2022 short “Terror/Forming” (in which Parker and his boyfriend make a gruesome discovery on the way to his late grandmother’s cabin). “How are Indigenous people living in a modern-day horror story in Canada?,” it asks.

“As I continue to explore the horror genre through an Indigenous lens, my goal is not only to depict supernatural terror but also to confront real-life horrors — discrimination, colonialism and the challenges faced by queer and Indigenous communities,” he says. “I believe that by subverting harmful stereotypes and amplifying Indigenous and LGBTQ2S+ voices, we can rewrite narratives that have long been dominated by colonial perspectives, reclaiming space for stories that have yet to be fully told.”