Eleven Films to Watch Out For At TIFF

Scott Henderson talks about Bruce McDonald's Trigger as an affirmation of Canada's maturing film scene.

While the Toronto International Film Festival tends to focus on the international more than the Toronto, there is one homegrown director whose work I always anticipate. This is Bruce McDonald, and this year sees the debut of his current project Trigger. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that McDonald and I both attended the same high school, Rexdale’s North Albion Collegiate, albeit a few years apart. I mention this because I have noted in his work a certain sensibility not dissimilar from my own. It is a sensibility borne of growing up in Toronto’s outer suburbs during the 1970s and ’80s.

Kids back then were fed a steady stream of popular culture from elsewhere – America and Britain mostly. All of this was viewed, however, through a peculiarly Canadian lens and absorbed alongside numerous Canadian references. Remember, this was well before the internet, and even, for most of us, pre-cable; back when culture came to us either over the airwaves or mediated through Canadian sources, such as AM radio stalwarts CHUM and CFTR.

This sensibility was highly evident in McDonald’s early efforts, such as Roadkill, with its concluding bloodbath in the Woodbridge Hotel. Back then Woodbridge was still a smaller place, out in the country for us Rexdale folk, and not simply an anonymous part of the blur that is now Vaughan. Highway 61 may have been set in northern Ontario and along the titular roadway spine of the U.S., but its conceit of Canadians so fascinated with American culture, such as the music and life of Bob Dylan, that they will give up their day jobs for a chance to experience America first-hand (in this case to escort a corpse to New Orleans), echoes the cultural influences felt so strongly in the suburbs.

It’s this suburban familiarily that has made me a fan of McDonald’s work throughout the years. Even as he has drifted in and out of television, directing episodes of American shows, but also of Canadian stalwarts such as Degrassi: The Next Generation, McDonald has continued to produce a number of fascinating Canadian films. His early critical success with Roadkill and Highway 61 led to the more ambitious and highly touted Dance Me Outside, and then possibly to Canada’s most significant rock and roll pic, the cult hit Hard Core Logo. I’m even a fan of his critically panned CBC television movie Platinum. Its critique of the music industry and the perils of a generic globalization of culture, along with its innovative use of form, make it an effort worthy of reconsideration.

McDonald’s more recent work has shown an ongoing contemplative fascination with form – a consideration of how cinema and popular culture allow us to make sense of our world. Platinum’s technological trickery reappears in The Tracey Fragments, where McDonald employs techniques such as split screens, multiple simultaneous camera angles, and parallel storylines to visually recreate the fragmented world of a troubled teenage girl on the streets of Winnipeg. Pontypool’s reliance on sound, and limited space to create compelling and genuine horror in rural Ontario again demonstrated McDonald’s mastery of form.

This overt concern for structure can be linked back to the aforementioned suburban Canadian roots. It was impossible to grow up in the Canadian suburbs of the 1970s and 80s without some awareness of the impact of popular culture. But while today’s youth are bombarded with a myriad of globalized, digital fare, those previous generations were highly conscious of their Canadian locale and the fact that this popular culture was coming from “elsewhere.” It may have been a subtle awareness at the time, but artists like McDonald (along with many others – and it is hard here, not to think of the parallels that can be found in Douglas Coupland’s suburban Vancouver influences) have made use of this to provide a critical perspective on the manner in which we encounter these influences.

So with all of this in mind, I can only hope for great things from McDonald’s latest film, Trigger. As the film inaugurating TIFF’s long awaited Bell Lightbox building, it has been given a place of prominence within this year’s festival. That it is such a Toronto-centric film makes it an obvious choice, but hopefully this same geographic specificity won’t scare off audiences in other parts of Canada. Trigger features a veritable who’s who of Canadian film talent, Sarah Polley, Callum Keith Rennie, Don McKellar, and, as the reuniting rock duo at the centre of the film, Molly Parker and the late Tracy Wright. As TIFF’s Canadian programming head Steve Gravestock told the CBC in announcing Trigger as the Lightbox opener, “Toronto seldom looks hipper than when it’s in a Bruce McDonald movie.”

It is the second McDonald rock-focused film to open this year. The first was This Movie is Broken, which centres on a Broken Social Scene concert. That the musical influences in Toronto are now more resolutely homegrown demonstrates the sea change since my own youth. There were of course Canadian bands back then, but the notion that any of them could be the impetus for a film would have been remote indeed. It is clear that Canadian music is a readily accepted aspect of the flow of popular culture for Canadian youth.

Up to now, Canadian film and television have only been able to dream of achieving such centrality within our cultural psyche. If there was some form of “entertainment justice,” then McDonald’s always smart, hip films would be as cited as the indie film darlings that find favour with today’s youth. Perhaps by pointing his lens at Broken Social Scene and then following it up with another film that reaffirms the maturity of Toronto’s music scene, McDonald will make the connection with the “hipster” crowd that his oeuvre has always deserved.