10 Canadian films to watch that might actually bring you joy

It's once again National Canadian Film Day, and it's once again still happening in the midst of a global pandemic that has left most of us scrambling to find whatever content we can to give us some much-needed escape. So CBC Arts decided to venture into waters that don't exactly have a reputation for jubilant swims: Canadian film. We asked our team and some regular contributors to offer some not-as-rare-as-you-think examples of our homegrown cinema that brings you joy — and might bring you some too.

Anne of Green Gables

Two wonderful things happened in the year of our Lord, 1985. The first: I was born. (You're welcome!) And, likely to commemorate my arrival into the world, Anne of Green Gables was first broadcast. In short, the Kevin Sullivan-directed mini-series is majestic. Over the course of several hours (and then several more in the 1987 sequel), we exist in Avonlea, PEI alongside Anne Shirley (played by Megan Follows, a national treasure), the orphaned oft-romantic and imaginative sweet baby tween who's adopted by siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. Through them and the people she meets, she learns the meaning of unconditional love, of what it means to be a kindred spirit, and that despite him being an absolute brat upon their first meeting, Gilbert Blythe is quite a magnificent person and an absolute dreamboat worthy of a second chance. I wasn't named for Anne Shirley (which I will always hold against my parents), but after spending hours watching and re-watching the series on VHS, I'm still convinced that maybe if I dared dream as big as she, I too could find a way to live by following both my head and my heart. I only wish I could carry off puffed sleeves. -Anne T. Donahue, CBC Arts columnist

The Cat Came Back

First, a history lesson in the childhood habits of elder millennials. Back in the early '90s, cartoons were hard to come by for a kid with no cable. Sure, there was the usual Saturday morning block, and maybe your local networks would program a few ancient reruns on weekdays: Care Bears at some ungodly pre-breakfast hour; Flintstones at noon; a half hour of Looney Tunes after school. It was an entertainment wasteland that made the prospect of watching a prime-time Peanuts special about childhood leukemia an actual delight. And if you were especially media-starved, experimental shorts produced by the National Film Board of Canada were among your few available thrills.

In that category, I don't think anything topped The Cat Came Back. A chance airing would be the talk of the playground, eight-year-olds recounting every bonkers detail of its seven-minute run time the morning after. (The scene where a beetle is run over on a train track — splitting perfectly in two — was a particular highlight, and upon recent viewing, I can say that it still holds up.) We knew we were getting something good back then — something deeply weird, and curiously subversive to a cohort raised on the Fred Penner version of the titular song. The film ostensibly follows the narrative of that well-known tune: Old Mr. Johnson (a bug-eyed bachelor) is befallen by trouble, namely, a yellow cat that will not leave his home. The situation escalates toward a (spoiler alert) fatal conclusion. Directed by Cordell Barker and produced by Richard Condie, the film was up for an Academy Award in 1988, but ultimately lost to an early Pixar short. If I'd known that factoid as a grade-schooler, there would have been a riot at the monkey bars. Watch it on the NFB's YouTube channel. -Leah Collins, CBC Arts senior writer

Gabrielle

Take a young woman's coming-of-age tale and mix in a love story, place it in Montreal, set the language to French, throw in a choir and a sprinkle of Robert Charlebois ... and here you have a film guaranteed to bring me joy. It's called Gabrielle and it's directed by Louise Archambault. The film tells the story of Gabrielle, a young woman living with a genetic condition called Williams syndrome, who is a passionate singer and part of a choir for adults living with disabilities. When Gabrielle falls for Martin, her friend in the choir, she struggles with being independent as her family struggles to let her be her own woman.

Gabrielle follows in the footsteps of other music movies that I love, like Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, where you get to see these emotional choir rehearsals with goosebumpy solos that build-up to a big final performance. In Gabrielle's choir, the songs are beautiful renditions of popular French songs by musicians like Niagara and Robert Charlebois (who appears in the film playing himself). Gabrielle is played by Gabrielle Marion-Rivard, a Montreal actor who won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Actress for the role. She's luminous. This movie makes me smile and sing "Lindberg" every time I watch it. Watch it now on CBC Gem. -Mercedes Grundy, CBC Arts producer

eXistenZ

Pulsating organic video game consoles that jack right into your spine. Underground networks of violent anti-game crusaders. A polluted landscape populated with grotesque, two-headed critters. Hardly the stuff of joy, you might object. But rewatching David Cronenberg's techno-thriller eXistenZ two decades after its release, it's hard to get over just how much fun everyone's clearly having! From the nesting doll of a plot to the resolutely B-movie dialogue ("We have enemies in our own house! Trust no one!"), Cronenberg and his cast — Jennifer Jason Leigh as a game designer savant on the run, Jude Law as the skittish marketing intern duty-bound to protect her — know exactly what game they're playing. eXistenZ belongs to a mini-genre of pre-Y2K flicks — 1995's The Net and Johnny Mnemonic, 1997's Abre los ojos and especially The Matrix, which came out a few weeks earlier in 1999 — that wrestled with questions of what's truly real in an increasingly virtual world. Peering back at those antique days through a Zoom-addled lens, it's refreshing to find at least one movie that doesn't take the question — and itself — too seriously. Last year, one of my colleagues named eXistenZ as the Canadian film he'd take with him into quarantine — and honestly, I probably wouldn't quite follow him there. But each time I think of Cronenberg's deliriously campy romp through the metaphysics of virtual living, I can't help but grin.  -Andrew D'Cruz, CBC Arts executive producer

John Ware Reclaimed

Creeks, buildings and schools are among the buildings named after John Ware, but what do we really know about the story of Black Canadian cowboys? Personally growing up, the answer was ... very little. Given some of its subject matter, this is not an obvious choice for a film that gives me joy, but after watching Cheryl Foggo's vibrant documentary John Ware Reclaimed, I was struck by how many moments made me feel connected with a man I never knew. With touching animation, re-creation and a unique soundtrack, she brings the story of Ware — who she describes as "one of those famous people no one's ever heard of, especially outside of Alberta" — to life in a big way. Finding him in historical records was not easy, but Cheryl, who has been keeping a "John Ware file" since her 20s, was up for the challenge. This doc reclaims a missing piece of Canadian history in an intimate and accessible way and also reminds me of what we've missed this past year in being distanced from our elders who carry these stories. Watch for free on the NFB's website. -Lucius Dechausay, CBC Arts video producer

Mommy

If Canadian films have a reputation for heaviness and heartbreak, then Xavier Dolan's Mommy is an extremely Canadian film. But at the centre of this tender-to-painful mother-son story is perhaps one of the most joyful scenes in the national cinema.

Die (Ann Dorval) is a single widowed mother raising her 15-year-old son, Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon), who has ADHD with violent tendencies. When Steve is kicked out of boarding school after setting the cafeteria on fire, the teenager returns to live with his mom, whose timid teacher-on-a-health-leave neighbour, Kyla (Suzanne Clément), becomes the boy's tutor — and the trio grows into a sort of family. In an early after-dinner scene, over cigarettes and shooters, Die shares the details of her son's disorder with Kyla, and Kyla discusses the reasons for her sabbatical. While the pair chat, Steve puts a burned CD into the disc changer, then dances mock-vampishly into the kitchen to the breathy opening notes of Céline Dion's "On ne change pas." He cajoles Die and Kyla to dance with him. And for a glorious moment, they lose themselves — and all their worries — to the music. Watch it now on Amazon Prime. -Chris Hampton, CBC Arts contributor

1991

1991 is one of those films that drives English-Canadian film producers mad with envy: a Quebecois romp that collected a pile of awards, had wide distribution and made a ton of dough. In fact, it topped the box office in Canada in 2018, earning well over $3 million. It also landed on Netflix, where you can now watch it en français with English subtitles. Ricardo Troggi's flick (the third in an autobiographical trilogy) features a sad-sack film student who follows his naive, Fellini-filled heart to Italy, where he meets eccentric travellers, loses all his papers (but not his gullibility) and (spoiler alert but no surprise) finds his love sleeping with another guy. Interspersed with black and white Fellini homage scenes that underscore his plight, the film is just the thing for the travel-starved. Italy! Rome! Perugia! Hostels! (Maybe not hostels.) Makes me smile and remember the carefree time of train passes, cheap wine and charming strangers at the train station wanting to take you for a ride. Watch it now on Netflix. -Grazyna Krupa, CBC Arts's executive in charge of programming

Shiva Baby

Canadian filmmaker Emma Seligman made quite the mark with her directorial debut Shiva Baby, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and was a hit when it was released in largely virtual theatres last month (landing Seligman an HBO deal with Adam McKay). A comedy suggestively set in an era that now feels pretty much like a period piece (2019), the film follows bisexual Jewish 20-something Danielle (Rachel Sennott) as she spends an afternoon at a secret-exposing shiva. With her overbearing parents in tow, Danielle's world is thrown into chaos by the attendance of both her ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon) and Max (Danny Defarri), an older man she's been having sex with for money. Various extremely uncomfortable revelations unfold, and the film marks a self-assured, well-acted and quite funny debut from Seligman. It also refreshingly does not make us yearn for the complicated social lives we might have had in the before times. Add that to a brisk 77-minute running time that's perfect for all our reduced attention spans, and that is epitome of cinematic joy in the lockdown era. Watch it now on TIFF's Digital Cinema. -Peter Knegt, CBC Arts producer

Waydowntown

The elevator pitch for Gary Burns's 2000 indie comedy set in the interconnected condos, business towers and shopping malls of Calgary's commerce district might go something like, "Office Space ... but Canadian." Shot in jittery digital video, seasoned with lo-fi surrealist fantasies and scored by a vigorous, vertiginous electroclash soundtrack, waydowntown is a rawer, richer and Gen Xier document than Mike Judge's beloved satire of corporate culture. Four coworkers — who each live in buildings attached by indoor plazas and skywalks to their office, kind of like an ant colony or a hamster habitat — bet a month's salary to see who can last the longest without going outside. (Too real?) The movie takes place almost entirely on the lunch hour of the 24th day in their competition, when wits unravel and the winner is determined. While it's fun watching the worker ants about their antics, waydowntown captures a very Canadian flavour of joy: when, after a long time cooped up inside, you finally get that big, beautiful, revitalizing breath of fresh air. -Chris Hampton, CBC Arts contributor

Why We Fight

Finally, do yourself a favour and spend time with an unbelievably beautiful family in every sense of the word in Maya Annik Bedward's short doc Why We Fight. The story centres around a Brazilian couple, whose family processes the ups and downs of life through Capoeira, all while trying to keep their son Nauê — who has a rare medical condition — alive.  They let you all the way in and don't let go from the cute opening scene as you watch the father serenade his young son in the bath. Watch it on CBC Gem now. -Lucius Dechausay, CBC Arts video producer