Discoveries from Canada World Cinema

When mobsters rob a mansion to settle unpaid debts, they find themselves facing an extremely dangerous retired WWI Commando — trying to live a peaceful life as a family butler.

Hoping to catch a burglar, a cop (Cameron Mathison) goes under cover as a nanny in an upscale community. As he looks for leads, he becomes involved with a high-maintenance family and a pretty caregiver (Sarah Lancaster) nearby.

Group of prostitutes who rely on each other to revolt against their sinister pimps. Their bid for freedom turns much more dangerous than they ever imagined.

A wealthy family’s life is upended when the 18-year-old daughter of a family friend comes to live with them for a few months.

In 1937, a young First Nations (Canadian native) girl named Ashtecome is kidnapped along with several other children from a village as part of a deliberate Canadian policy to force First Nations children to abandon their culture in order to be assimilated into white Canadian/British society. She is taken to a boarding school where she is forced to adopt Western Euro-centric ways and learn English, often under brutal treatment. Only one sympathetic white teacher who is more and more repelled by this bigotry offers her any help from among the staff. That, with her force of will, Ashtecome (forced to take the name Amelia) is determined to hold on to her identity and that of her siblings, who were also abducted.

A behind the scenes look at the seedy underbelly of puppeteering and what it really takes to make it in children's television.

In the south of Laos, an American volunteer doctor becomes a fugitive after he intervenes in the sexual assault of a young woman. When the assailant's body is pulled from the Mekong River, things quickly spiral out of control.

On the verge of attack by the evil witch queen, Prince Dev and Princess Kyra turn to a young rebel named Gorhager for help in protecting the Human World and the Dragon World.

In order to save her family’s contracting business, Blair reluctantly teams up with her ex-boyfriend and former co-star of a hit home design reality show to build a tiny home for the unsheltered in the community, rekindling old sparks in the process… and just in time for Christmas.

A man returns to his family home on the East Coast of Canada to say goodbye to his terminally ill mother.

Cut off from home and facing an impossible mission against mounting odds, "Deep Six" is a hyper-realistic live-action portrayal of a deep space forward operating base at a pivotal moment for humankind 250 years in our future.

Alex is an ambitious architect who is looking forward to celebrating Christmas at her mother’s beautiful Swiss Inn, until she finds out that her former best friend Beth who married Alex’s ex-boyfriend Jesse will also be there. Could a new romance with the Inn’s handsome manager and single-father Liam be the key to show Alex the magic of Christmas and open her up to forgiveness this holiday season?

Disturbed teenager Jo Fay loses it and attacks a nurse at the hospital when she is told her critically ill mother won't qualify for a liver transplant due to her chronic alcoholism. Years later, when she is released from a mental institution, Jo seems normal but harbors a ferocious rage to take revenge on everyone she blames for her mother's death. Ashley Jones, Carlena Britch star. (2017)

During the long train ride from Montreal to Vancouver, a man and woman find themselves increasingly attracted to each other.

An autistic child growing up in the 1940's and 50's with a mother who is bitter because her fear of success has denied to herself a possible career in opera. This anger translates into an over-protectiveness of her mentally ill daughter, even into the child's adulthood. But a loving sister, herself having an arm that is paralyzed, is a bastion against the limitations imposed by the mother and finally helps her sister to live a more full life.

Katherine "Kathy" is happily married to businessman Greg Norris and lives in his beautiful home with his about 18-year old daughter Tara. When suddenly a charming young man, who Tara first saw lurking around in the garden, turns up on their doorstep claiming he must be Jamie, the baby son she once gave up for adoption as a teenage mother on her parents' orders, the couple is delighted to meet him. They even take him in as they hear his adoptive parents have died in car accident and he's looking for a place to stay during his business studies just like Greg, to pay for which he held various jobs, even in Rio. The only one who remains suspicious is Tara, who doesn't want to be the kid sister and starts looking for holes is Jamie's story, going trough his things and having a friend examine his past- there are, since he didn't tell the Norris family about his lover who helps him unconditionally with his sinister hidden agenda.

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

Returning to a "home" they hardly know after being deported from their adopted countries for minor criminal offenses, three people from very different backgrounds try to make a new life for themselves, in Jamaica in this gutsy drama from writer-director Sudz Sutherland. (TIFF)

Tom Lane is the star columnist for the media conglomerate owned San Francisco Sun newspaper. The company is thinking about increasing Tom's exposure by producing a new television show around him. Liz Madison is the advice columnist for the little read community newspaper, the Marin County Voice, which is a throwback to gentler times. Besides their journalistic occupations, one other similar aspect between Tom and Liz is that they are both currently single, with their friends and family doing whatever they can to find that special someone for their personal life. On November 2, the staff at the Voice learn that the Sun ownership has bought their newspaper, with the probable goal of folding it into the operations of the Sun. If this move does happen, the staff at the Voice will lose their jobs. To fight back, Liz decides to change her column to an editorial espousing the meaning of Christmas and the newspaper to the community...

The Untold Story of the Suffragists of Newfoundland (1999) is a docu-drama celebrating the thirty year struggle by the women of Newfoundland to win the right to vote.

A boy begrudgingly buys second hand skates which turn out to make him the best hockey player ever - via three wishes.

A young man in Calgary, Alberta is multiphobic: nonetheless, he believes that he is the cause of the fear which is killing people around him.

What if you had only five days to figure out... everything.

After a childhood on the road with her legendary singer-songwriter father, organic teashop owner Bonnie Highstreet, wants nothing to do with the music business, but when she helps music sensation Ryder Jamison, develop lyrics for his new solo album, she rekindles her long abandoned dream and falls in love.

When her accountant husband is kidnapped, Anne Bradshaw reluctantly turns to the police for help. She soon finds herself falling in love with the lead detective, and the two must fight their feelings for each other in order to rescue an innocent man.

On a misty morning in the fall of 1985, a small group of Haida people blockaded a muddy dirt road on Lyell Island, demanding the government work with Indigenous people to find a way to protect the land and the future. In a riveting new feature documentary drawn from more than a hundred hours of archival footage and audio, award-winning director Christopher Auchter (Now Is the Time) recreates the critical moment when the Haida Nation’s resolute act of vision and conscience changed the world.

Henri was raised by religious in a convent and lived with them until the women, now elders, moved, leaving him alone. Henri fixes lamps. Since his young age, he's been replacing burned light bulbs and illuminates people's lives. After following signs, he finds himself working in a lamp company. Through his new work, he meets an old man trying to never forget his glory days and a blind woman, teller in an adult cinema, with whom he falls in love.

Ricky, Julian and Bubbles are about to get out of jail, and this time, Julian vows to go straight, even open a legit business. Soon the Boys will all be rich. At least that's what they've told the parole board. But when they arrive back at the park, they find it's not the same old Sunnyvale - and it's not the same old Jim Lahey, Trailer Park Supervisor.

An acclaimed medieval romance novelist is hired to be a matchmaker for a real-life prince in a desperate attempt to find true love before the fixed royal wedding date. But as their quest draws cues from romance novel clichés, tropes start to become real, and they must decide whether to become the characters in their own fanciful love story or bow to tradition.

Joseph Bible Story

Book-cover artist Leanna pretends to be the elusive author of a hit romance novel that was secretly written by snobbish literary novelist Michael. She doesn’t expect to find love herself.

A man's brother dies of an overdose from a new and potent drug introduced by a drug gang. He puts off his wedding to a beautiful model and postpones taking over the family business while he travels to Hong Kong to learn Tiger Claw kung fu from its master. Then he plans to take his revenge on the drug dealers responsible for his brother's death.

Fed up with being censored in their post-Trailer Park Boys lives, the out of work stars/world-renowned 'swearists', Mike Smith, Robb Wells and John Paul Tremblay decide to start their own uncensored network on the internet.

When Laura begins to suspect her husband is cheating on her, she is devastated by his infidelity, despite having a torrid affair of her own. While she desperately tries to save her marriage, Laura's mysterious past begins to emerge, making her more paranoid, delusional and violent in alarming ways. As her mental state continues to unravel, whoever gets in the way of Laura's myriad of fantasies becomes expendable, revealing the shocking dream world that insulates her from reality.

Former classmates run into each other at a bar and form an unexpected bond.

On the night of the strangest wedding in cinema history, a grotesque gang boss hires a stonecold killer to bring him the finger of a fading, drug-addicted jazz legend.

When Brian De Palma's 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise was released, it was considered a failure almost everywhere. Except in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Here is the story of a town and its love for the now cult classic.

Sweeney is a playwright on a career decline. He spends much of his time wheedling money and beer out of his artistic friend Moriarty. One of his few highlights is weekly sex with his ex-wife Georgia. She is remarried to a rich but vile construction developer, but Sweeney and Gorgina are still in love.

Shot over a period of 7 years, a group of young suburban friends get together during summertimes. They wonder about their future, their ambitions and their love lives. We meet up with them 5 years later, then 1 year later. Flashwood, a story of a youth trying to find itself.

When popular love and relationship podcaster and future author, Nikki Parsons is dumped by her boyfriend the day before she meets her new publisher, she has to think fast. She enlists her irritatingly handsome neighbor to pose as her boyfriend for a weekend of mingling with the literary elite.

Four twentysomethings find themselves stuck on a haunted antique bed where leaving means suffering a gruesome death. Plagued with frightening hallucinations, they must figure out the bed's secrets before they are ultimately picked off one by one.

Danni Hartford, party planner to the King family, wants to find her sister. Britney, the Kings' spoiled 15-year-old daughter, wants a horse. On a nearby horse farm, Rachel is treated like a servant by her foster siblings; all she wants is a real family. When all three girls make wishes at the Christmas dance, Britney and Rachel's souls switch bodies. But the girls soon find their new lives are not exactly what they pictured. When Danni discovers what has happened, she must figure out how to switch the girls back.

Trapped in an abandoned house, a nameless man desperately searches for clues to how he got there. The answer is hidden within a series of disturbing viral videos - each of which begins to infect his mind.

Scientists Banting, Best, Collip and Macleod at the University of Toronto as they race for a treatment to cure 13-year-old Leonard Thompson of his life-threatening diagnosis of diabetes.

The story of two very different boys in the Canadian wilderness. They must learn to depend on each other in order to survive.

After his laptop is stolen, an aspiring rapper goes on a quest across the gentrifying streets of Toronto to recover his music in time for the event that could change his life - a meeting with a Grammy Award-winning producer.

Having helped his brother King Edward IV take the throne of England, the jealous hunchback Richard, Duke of Gloucester, plots to seize power for himself. Masterfully deceiving and plotting against nearly everyone in the royal court, including his eventual wife, Lady Anne, and his brother George, Duke of Clarence, Richard orchestrates a bloody rise to power before finding all his gains jeopardized by those he betrayed.

After an abusive, dangerous relationship, a wealthy pampered new bride who has been under psychiatric care for mental issues is either sabotaging herself and her husband or her new husband is rapidly making her unstable.

A father gives his daughter an unorthodox upbringing on the fringes of the Alaskan underworld in the 1960's and 70's.

A teen comedy follows a group as it tries to have one last night of summer fun, only to be usurped by the world's worst undercover cop.

When Valerie returns home from prison years after killing her neighbour in an apparent drunk driving accident, she wants nothing more than to move on - until the deceased's son shows up at her door and it becomes clear that the past is not easily forgotten.

Lucky Christmas is the story of Holly Ceroni, a single mom trying to get back on her feet, but who is crushed to learn her winning lottery ticket is in the glove compartment of her recently stolen car. Mike Ronowski, the construction worker behind Holly's missing property, goes along with a master plan to befriend Holly and coerce her into giving him half of her winnings. Mike unexpectedly falls in love with Holly and learns there are more important things in life than quick money in time for the holidays.

Seventeen-year old Farley has the stick-handling skills of the next Sidney Crosby. Not that Farley has any idea who Crosby is. He’s led a sheltered life, homeschooled by parents whose idea of homework is trips to an art gallery or ashram. His best friend is Eve, the girl who’s lived next door since they were both three. Much to the dismay of his parents, Farley loves to play shinny with the local rink rats. To their even greater dismay, Farley is signed to a major hockey league, where he achieves instant stardom, throwing him into a world of hype. Farley soon finds that hockey fame comes with a price, including the expectation to fight. Throw in a changing relationship with Eve – and Farley is losing his way.

A documentary about the world of software and the software makers. How do people from outside the industry see it and what do people from inside the industry think about regular computer users?

A severely injured man and woman awake in an abandoned sanitarium only to discover that a sadistic caretaker holds the keys to their freedom and the horrific answers as to their true identity.

Moving into his late grandfather's house, young Jack inherits the old man's dog, Skipper - who can talk! With the sassy pooch's help, Jack learns that Grandpa left a priceless Spanish treasure hidden somewhere in the town. Jack joins forces with a trio of clever neighbor kids - a goth girl, a socialite, and a jokester - to find the valuable booty, with Skipper leading the way. But can they outrun the brazen, bumbling thieves that will stop at nothing to seize the prize for themselves?

When a pampered Hollywood pooch is sent up to North to live with a wise cracking farm-mutt, all leashes are off.

Pierre is a Montreal photojournalist who returns from Nicaragua to find that his ten-year menage a trois is over. Haunted by his mid-life crisis, he becomes obsessed with trying to find out why his two lovers, Sarah and David, have left him.

Jean-François, Ronald, Alexis, Cédric, Benoit and Maxim are gladiators of modern times. From the strongman to the top-class bodybuilder, to the veteran who has become a trainer, they all share the same definition and obsession with overcoming their limitations. They are waiting for the next competition, working hard in the gym and following extreme diets.

TV Movie directed by Gary Yates. Claire is hosting her best friend's wedding. Guests arrive, old family conflicts resurface and the night before the wedding, the Groom goes missing. Only Claire knows of Danny's disappearance and she is determined to find him and bring him back before her best friend finds out.