Toronto film fest's Canadian lineup takes a kid's eye view

The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival will debut new works from prominent homegrown filmmakers like Deepa Mehta and Bruce McDonald, as well as feature a Canadian lineup dominated by films where children are the stars.

Organizers unveiled a 64-film Canadian lineup of features and short films at a downtown Toronto hotel on Tuesday afternoon.

As many expected, Fernando Meirelles' Canadian-Brazilian-Japanese co-production Blindness — which opened the Cannes film fest this spring — has been added to the TIFF lineup.

"If you look at the selection that was announced today, I think what you'll see is that Canada is plugged into the whole world. That's really where I'm coming from as well," the festival's new co-director Cameron Bailey, who immigrated to Canada as a child, told CBC News.

"This is what Toronto is right now," said Bailey, who had been a TIFF programmer since the early 1990s. 

"We want to be contemporary. We want to be relevant to people who live here and come to the festival every year."

Other Canadian features include:

• Mehta's latest, Heaven on Earth, which stars Bollywood star Preity Zinta as a young Indian woman who emigrates to Canada for an arranged marriage.
• Fifty Dead Men Walking, Kari Skogland's portrait of British police recruit Martin McGartland, who infiltrated and spied on the Irish Republican Army during the 1980s.
• One Week, Michael McGowan's tale of a young man who when confronted with a devastating cancer diagnosis decides to embark on a cross-country road trip.
• Philippe Falardeau's coming of age drama C'est pas moi, je le jure! (It's Not Me, I Swear!).
• Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool, an adaptation of the Tony Burgess novel about a deadly virus taking over the titular small Ontario town.
• Toronto Stories, a collection of four tales about the city as witnessed by a young boy over the course of one day and directed by Sook-Yin Lee, Suz Sutherland, David Weaver and Aaron Woodley.
• Edison and Leo, a stop-motion animated feature described as a "fairytale-gone-wrong" about an inventor who puts his family in danger as he tries to create the electric light bulb.
• Control Alt Delete, a quirky romantic comedy set in the midst of the late 90's tech boom about a computer geek obsessed with internet porn.
• Cooper's Camera, a 1985-set comedy about a dysfunctional family Christmas, told through the eyes of the family's youngest son and via his newest present: a second-hand VHS camcorder.
• Carl Bessai's Mothers & Daughters, a look at strained relations between three women and their daughters.
• Léa Pool's Maman est chez le coiffeur, a family drama told from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old girl who must care for her father and brothers when her mother suddenly leaves.
• Only, an Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds film about a boy whose humdrum life at his family's Northern Ontario motel is disrupted by the arrival of a young girl.

"I don't know how to account for [the focus on children]," Steve Gravestock, the Toronto festival's associate director of Canadian programming, said after the lineup announcement.

"It's possibly [these] filmmakers are getting slightly older and addressing these issues," he said, adding that other factors might include nostalgia, "how turbulent the world is right now and possibly shifts in marital structure. It's hard to say."

Nevertheless, he emphasized that while children might be the stars of many of these selections, "they're not children's films."

For instance, Falardeau's C'est pas moi is "an extraordinary film about a 12-year-old hellion who has suicidal tendencies" amid his family breaking up, Gravestock said.

Praising it as "one of the best films of the year," Gravestock described it as "extraordinarily funny, very probing, very incisive."

Further additions to the TIFF lineup are expected in the coming weeks. The 10-day Toronto International Film Festival opens Sept. 4 with Paul Gross' First World War epic Passchendaele.