Social distancing got you down? Here's 3 Canadian movies on Netflix to keep you company

By Alya Stationwala

With a worldwide pandemic on our hands, the Canadian government has urged people to avoid large gatherings and stay close to home. Streets empty and events cancelled, COVID-19 has very abruptly changed our lives into entering a health crisis quarantine. So, while you are stuck in your room getting through another canned food meal and surrounded by your emergency supply of toilet paper, here’s a few Canadian movies streaming on Netflix to keep you busy.

Bruno and Boots (2016 - 2017)

Photo: Aircraft Pictures

Photo: Aircraft Pictures

Universities, high schools and elementary schools are closed nationwide and have moved to online learning, at least for the next few weeks. If you’re missing the school ground drama you can always follow the academic shenanigans of Bruno and Boots.

An Aircraft Pictures production for the YTV channel, Bruno and Boots is a television film series based on Gordon Korman’s Macdonald Hall series of young adult novels. Originally aired in 2016, the story follows two high school troublemakers at a prestigious school for boys making their mark through high jinks, whether they go well or not. The best part is, if you like the first one, there’s two more in the series available on Netflix during your staycation.

Goon (2011)

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Photo: Magnolia Pictures

The NHL, MLB, and NBA have officially closed doors due to COVID-19 fears until further notice. If you’re looking to get your sports fix, look no further than the hockey classic Goon.

Sharing the world of fighting on ice, Goon tells the story of a tough new player on the Halifax Highlander team who has to punch his way to the top. Led in a truly Canadian fashion, the film is produced and written by Ottawa resident Jay Baruchel, who you might know as the voice of Hiccup in the How to Train Your Dragon series. To boot, there’s a sequel if you’re looking for more drama on the rink: Goon: Last of the Enforcers.

Into the Forest (2015)

Photo: Rhombus Media

Photo: Rhombus Media

While we may not be in the middle of an apocalypse, the dystopian vibes of the country-wide lockdown cannot be ignored. Surviving when there’s no one else around is something this Canadian movie can give you tips about, so take notes while you watch. 

Without gas, water, electricity, or cellphones, Into the Forest is a story of an apocalypse forcing two sisters into the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Starring Ellen Page and directed by Patricia Rozema, this 2015 Canadian flick will leave you prepared for anything that may come your way. 

To help flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic, staying home is the best way to minimize the spread of the virus so we can get to a place where everything starts to level off. 

So, while you are stuck at home for the next few weeks, Canada has something for you which you can watch in the comfort of your own home after wrestling for a box of granola bars at your local grocery store. 

Best of Female Directors at Carlton Cinema

As part of one of the many film festivals sponsored by WILDsound, the Female Directors Short Film Festival at Carlton Cinema in Toronto included films from Canada, Australia and the U.S.

By Ivonne Flores Kauffman

WILDsound Festival accomplished to bring together Toronto’s cinephiles for a night of great short films, directed by and starring women, that awakened a mix of emotions in the audience during the Female Directors Short Film Festival.

But of course, some films were better than others. Here is a short review of some of them.

Old Habits

Directed by Mary Musolino, this Australian film manages to take the viewer on a reminiscing trip in only seven minutes. The film starts with two old women talking about their past in a beach-side changing room. They talk about their first love, their late friend and life itself.

It’s not until one of them confesses to her sister that she doesn’t love the man in her life anymore that the film starts making sense. At that moment, two young girls enter the change room and discuss their recent crushes. This scene shows some sort of remorse from the sisters regarding their past decisions and how they have influenced their lives to the point where one of the sisters asks the other to leave her lover and run away with her, to which the other sister declines.

This film, despite being short, accomplishes to create a great narrative and provides an unexpected ending. Perhaps the most interesting aspect about it is that the viewer can identify themselves with this story. We all have taken decisions that have altered our lives forever and lead to asking ourselves “What if?”

Bet the Demons Win

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Directed by another Australian filmmaker, Denise Hurley, Bet the Demons Win tells the story of a teenager who is tormented by her past demons — in other words, her gambling-addicted father and a sister who betrayed her. The eight-minute short film is filled with emotions such as desperation and anger. Karlisha Hurley, who plays the lead role, gives an excellent performance. However, the film still lacks content and is ultimately confusing. The story starts abruptly with Hurley’s character fighting with her sister and ends in the same way. The beginning and the end of the plot are missing in this film, which makes it impossible to take anything out of it except that Hurley’s character is full of rage and pain.

My Name Was January

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Directed by Canadians Elina Gress and Lenée Son, this documentary tells the story of January Marie Lapuz, a Filipino trans woman, who was brutally murdered in her home in New Westminster, B.C. in September 2012.

January, a sex worker, was stabbed 18 times in her home before dying. Despite being an awful crime that shook a community, My Name Was January is a tribute to January’s life and legacy rather than a film about her death. The film has some honest and raw scenes, like those where January’s mom is interviewed. It also includes interviews with January’s closest friends and members of the trans community. My Name Was January is a beautiful piece regarding the life of a strong woman who was killed in a horrible way. 

Even though the film is beautifully made, it ultimately failed to achieve its full potential. There are some moving scenes, however, the pieces didn’t completely fit together. The film had great scenes that were unrelated to each other, perhaps the reason for it being that it was directed and produced by January’s closest friends whose main focus was to remember January.

Canada at the 2020 Academy Awards

Photo: theacademy via Instagram

By Alya Stationwala

The biggest night in Hollywood is coming up on Feb. 9 and within the mass of recognition, a few Canadians have slipped into the Academy Awards nomination lists including Best Documentary Short, Best Live Action Short and more.

Sami Khan, from Sarnia, Ont., earned a nomination for his co-directing on St. Louis Superman, a story about a battle rapper and activist who was elected in the heavily white, Republican Missouri House of Representatives. Up against a wide range of short documentary stories from around the world including South Korea, Afghanistan, and Sweden, Khan is one of many people bringing in diversity in an otherwise whitewashed run of the Oscars this year.

In a phone interview with Canadian Press writer Victoria Ahearn, Khan talked about the moment he heard the news of his nomination saying him and his family had a mini dance party in their Toronto home before realizing, “We had to drop our daughter off at daycare.”

Meryam Joobeur, a Tunisian-Canadian director and writer, is also nominated for her live-action short film Brotherhood. The story follows a Tunisan father dealing with the return of his oldest son with a mysterious new Syrian wife, causing him to question if his son has been working for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). She has won 22 awards and earned eight other nominations at film festivals around the world for this production since it was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.

Other Canadians who have earned themselves the chance to compete for a golden statue are Dennis Gassner and Dean DeBlois for their roles in the major productions 1917 and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World respectively.

Gassner, born in Vancouver, worked on the production design for Sam Mendes’ WWI epic 1917. This is his seventh Oscar nomination, one of which he won in 1992 for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration on the historical drama about a gangster moving to Hollywood, Bugsy.

DeBlois faces his third nomination for the How to Train your Dragon trilogy alone, earning nominations for the animated films in 2011 and 2015 as well. Up against Xilam’s I Lost My Body, Netflix’s Klaus, Laika Studios’ Missing Link, and Pixar’s Toy Story 4, this is the last chance for the production to win Best Animated Film for its final installment.

In an interview with Ahearn, Deblois said, “When it comes to the Oscars and awards in general, I try not to think about it, otherwise I kind of carry this guilt of representing 400-plus people who worked on the movie.”

Minority Inclusion at the Academy Awards

Despite being one of the most celebrated nights for the film industry, The Academy has had a bad history with representation in their nominations throughout the past, including the famous #OscarsSoWhite controversy of 2015. 

Under fire for another year, the Oscars have been criticized for their 2020 white and male dominated nominations for major categories yet again.

Greta Gerwig was snubbed from a Best Director nomination for her film Little Women despite being nominated in multiple acting categories and even Best Picture, leaving the directing category with only male nominees. 

Cynthia Erivo, the only person of colour nominated for an acting role this year, is nominated for playing a slave in Harriet, whereas Scarlett Johansson earned herself two acting nominations playing a woman going through a divorce in Marriage Story, and an anti-nazi mother during WWII in Jojo Rabbit. 

Besides Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite recognition this year, people of colour and women are often ignored at the major awards in Hollywood. Smaller categories such as Best Live Action Short and Best Documentary Short are examples of places where the underrepresented are earning praise with seven of ten films in those two categories alone telling stories of people of colour and/or created by people of colour.

While most of these movies remain under the radar, Canadians like Sami Khan and Meryam Joobeur are artists that are pushing stories of marginalized people in film on the industry’s biggest platforms.

The Academy Awards will be held this weekend where Hollywood will be celebrating themselves in a glamorous televised party, and where minority artists in film, including some of the Canadian nominees this year, will hopefully be earning themselves a few statuettes.

Review: The Breadwinner

By Adriana Fiorante

The Breadwinner (2017) is an animated co-production between Canada, Ireland and Luxembourg about a young girl, Parvana (Saara Chaudry), surviving the Taliban’s seizing of her hometown, Kabul. In the plot, Taliban soldiers Idrees (Noorin Gulamgaus) and Razaq (Kawa Ada) take Parvana’s father (Ali Badshah) to prison for committing the crime of keeping forbidden books in his home and teaching women to read. The main focus of this film is the lack of rights Afghani women have under the Taliban rule. To combat the restrictions imposed on women and girls, Parvana cuts all her hair off to make herself look like a boy so she can buy food, get water, and work so her family can survive. She meets Shauzia (Soma Chhaya), another girl who is acting under the same disguise.

Feature image courtesy of thebreadwinnermovie via Instagram

Hearing the plotline, you might think The Breadwinner is similar to other animated coming-of-age films based in a war-torn Islamic country, such as Osama, Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, or The Kite Runner. But while these films show vibrancy, detail, developed characters, and rich plotlines, The Breadwinner falls short on most of these aspects.

Overall, despite its high praise - three Canadian Screen Awards, a European Film Award, and an Oscar nod - I was disappointed. From the beginning, any threat of danger seems more like a plot device than something that instigates or motivates the characters’ arcs, as Parvana’s entire family is almost unbothered by the Taliban men wielding machine guns that surround them. At one point, Parvana’s father speaks back to a Taliban member who is armed with a gun, her mother later argues with one of them, and Shauzia and Parvana both run around the streets of their town, treating it more as a playground than a war zone. The film almost trivializes the Taliban rule to create a family-friendly film.

Some may argue that the character’s lack of fear is because the characters are all very brave, but in my opinion, it seems implausible that they would all be so unfazed by violence and willing to test their luck in front of trigger-happy extremists. For me, it felt more like there was no real threat of violence and that the soldiers were just there to show the audience that life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule is rough. Not only does nobody seem to actually worry about those keeping them from freedom, but no character suffers a fatal punishment; displaying the unrealistic idea that the Taliban members use their gun as a prop more than a tool for cruelty and oppression.

Deborah Ellis, the author of The Breadwinner novel stated in an interview with CBC news that Parvana “[is] a girl who is not at all interested in being heroic or strong or brave or anything ... But she rises to the circumstances that life throws at her.” To me, this seems like Ellis is defending herself from any criticisms of creating a one-dimensional character that has no real objectives or drive. Parvana is apparently uninterested by bravery and strength, and yet those are two fundamental themes throughout the novel and the film. What I believe Ellis and the rest of the creators of this film fail to notice is that for a woman or girl to survive in extremist areas of the globe; they cannot have a devil-may-care attitude. Women and girls of Afghanistan under Taliban-rule were forced to wear a burqa while in public at all times, were not allowed to work and were not allowed to pursue an education past the age of eight, or they face being lashed or hurt.

For the most part, the film lazily pushes through the motions of storytelling without any real passion or much attention to detail. For instance, Parvana mentions she has a brother who passed away, but his life and death is relayed in very limited detail, despite the evident fact that it affected Parvana and her family significantly. This could have been elaborated.

Additionally, the film is incomplete in its character building. Parvana’s father is one-dimensional and seemingly used as nothing but a plot device to give Parvana an objective throughout the movie. Parvana’s sister Soraya has virtually no characteristics besides fulfilling the stereotypical older sister trope - as she consistently nags Parvana and is concerned with nothing but her appearance - and being an object that her mother can arrange into a marriage.

The Breadwinner follows parallel plotlines; the second being the story of the Elephant King, a folk tale Parvana relays to her friends and family. The plotline of the Elephant King weaves together and mirrors the plotline of the primary story. It is about a young boy whose village is victim to theft by a gang of tigers who steal their crops and seeds produced in an otherwise successful farming season. The villagers will starve the following year if they do not have the seeds, and so the young boy journeys out to defeat the gang and their leader, the Elephant King, to claim their seeds back. Although the Elephant King story is a substantial part of the film that is meant to mirror the reality of Parvana’s life and act as a means of entertainment to distract those around her from their reality, it is abruptly brought up at random and inconvenient times that don’t really highlight how the plotlines are mirrored, though it sloppily attempts to do so.  

Photo courtesy of thebreadwinnermovie via Instagram

On top of all of this, the climax of the film occurs abruptly with no precursor or tension building apart from Taliban soldiers shouting in the streets that a war has started, just in time to save Parvana from certain death. The film does little to explain who is fighting against who and why they are doing so, relying on the audience to already know the details behind the Afghanistan War.

However, this lack of detail makes sense, as the majority of the film’s creators are not of South-Asian descent. Nora Twomey, a white, Irish woman directed the film. The screenwriter, Anita Doron, is a white, Hungarian Canadian woman. The producers are four white men, two of which, Andrew Rosen and Anthony Leo, are Canadians. The entire cast is South Asian Canadians, with three members being Afghan. While it is accurate and admirable to cast South Asians in a movie set in South Asia about South Asians, having virtually no inclusion of these voices behind the scenes seems to work against the film’s ability to accurately relay the complexities of Taliban-run Afghanistan.

The overwhelming aspect that reveals how inadequate and ill-equipped the filmmakers were at doing justice to this story is the terrible accents performed by most of the cast. Ada, a very practiced Afghan Canadian actor, doubled as the dialect coach for the film. Still, much of the cast sounded more like a non-native speaker’s idea of what an Arabic accent should be rather than a native Dari or Pashto speaker.  

The animation, however, salvages some respectability for the film, as it is lively and expertly uses bright reds, greens and blues when Parvana is telling the story of the Elephant King, and dull yellows, browns and blacks when she is in Kabul, showing the stark contrast between her dream life and reality. The animation was done in part in Canada’s Guru Studio, The Breadwinner being the company’s first feature film.

While The Breadwinner is beautifully animated with creative aspects, it is hard to get past the uneven plot, rushed ending, and weak details. It is even harder to relate to a character’s struggle when they are given little to no attributes, as sympathetic as their plights are.

Video courtesy Movieclips Indie via YouTube