For years Canadian cinema was referred to as invisible cinema for its lack of global impact and struggle to compete with Hollywood’s massive export of blockbuster films. Each year film festivals around Canada aim to disprove this notion and push the potential and visibility of Canadian cinema to other parts of the world – and more importantly to other Canadians.
One such film festival is Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Every year they release their Top 10 Canadian film list.
If you’ve attended the Available Light Film Festival (ALFF) in recent years it is likely you have seen films from these list. The films Mommy (Xavier Dolan), Sol (Cousineau, Avingaq), Violent (Huculiak), or my personal favourite of the ALFF2015 Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane Lafleur), were all among the films included in TIFF’s best of 2014.
Thanks to the programming team at ALFF(Andrew Connors and Erin Corbett) they have
Finally, the hard-hitting documentary Ninth Floor joins ALFF 2016. Over four decades after the infamous Sir George Williams Riot in which students protested racism at the Montreal university in 1969, Ninth Floor reopens the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations and one of the most contested episodes in the nation’s history.
Making an audacious foray into nonfiction, writer and director Mina Shum engages the original protagonists in a compassionate cinematic exercise of reckoning and redemption. Ninth Floor is a remarkable film about human rights and the struggle for equality.
The Yukon Film Society presents the 2016 Available Light Film Festival Feb. 7 to 14, with screenings at the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre and the Yukon Arts Centre. For the festival schedule go to YukonFilmSociety.com/ALFF.
