10 great Canadian debut features

Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron has emerged as an unlikely but worthy critical darling. Swathed in international festival laurels, it’s the most auspicious Canadian feature debut in years. The film is a family portrait made up of stolen glances and overheard conversations, mediated by analogue cameras, camcorders and iPhones and filtered through the director’s own memories of growing up in British Columbia in the early 2000s.

Building on the delicate revelations of her acclaimed 2020 short Still Processing – a stylised documentary about the digitisation of her father’s collected photographs and undeveloped negatives – the director zeroes in on her own personal experience of trauma while also telescoping outward to address larger questions around the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues, and the interface between individual parents and the institutions designed to offer support.

On one level, Blue Heron is a period piece, vividly limning the textures (and technology) of its era (including a few well-placed Canadian heritage moments) to locate Sasha’s coming-of-age in a concrete context; at the same time, it’s an ambitious and elliptical exercise in structure, slicing deftly through time, space and point-of-view until the distance between past and present – and also reality and fantasy – collapses altogether.

Beautifully shot by Maya Bankovic and precisely edited by Kurt Walker, it’s the work of a filmmaker who has not only found her voice but has the confidence to articulate the things in life that nobody wants to hear about, and also that cannot be left unsaid.

As the film hits UK cinemas, here’s a look back on 10 more feature debuts that announced exciting new voices in Canadian film.

Director: Michel Brault

Michel Brault was already a seasoned filmmaker when he made Between Salt and Sweet Water (Entre la mer et l’eau douce), having helmed a series of short documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada and worked as a cinematographer for important French-Canadian contemporaries like Pierre Perrault. But the freshness of his feature debut is still palpable; its tale of a small-town striver (Claude Gauthier) seduced by the bright lights of Montreal – and the beautiful waitress (Geneviève Bujold) who symbolises the promise of a cosmopolitan metropolis – split the difference between hard-edged naturalism and poetry, creating a template for several generations of independent Canadian directors (including Don Shebib, whose 1970 feature Goin’ down the Road, set in Toronto, is basically a spiritual sibling).

Director: Allan King

Like his fellow direct-cinema pioneer Frederick Wiseman, Vancouver-born documentarian Allan King spoke often about doing the majority of his work before the cameras rolled – about inveigling his way into his subjects’ environment and getting a sense of its rhythms, and then handing things over to his crew. “It’s like casing the joint,” said the director, and Warrendale, set in an experimental care facility outside Toronto for disturbed children, is rife with stolen moments, even as King’s observational approach takes nothing from his under-age subjects.

The raw, bruised surfaces of KIng’s first feature conceal – but don’t contradict – its thoughtful ambivalence as a piece of institutional portraiture that places the onus of interpretation on the audience. The results impressed no less than Jean Renoir, who declared it one of the greatest films he’d ever seen.

Director: Phillip Borsos

Veteran stagecoach robber Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth) is already old-fashioned when he’s caught red-handed in 1868. Emerging from the prison 33 years later in 1901, he’s not just behind-the-times but a sort of forlorn Rumpelstiltskin, a lanky relic of the Wild West on the wrong side of modernity. When he sees Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), he’s inspired to update his tactics.

The existential tenderness of Philip Borsos’s drama is real, embedded in the gorgeous British Columbia landscapes and carried in Farnsworth’s soulful performance – a fortuitous piece of casting after original choice Harry Dean Stanton bailed on the production to work with Francis Ford Coppola.

Director: Patricia Rozema

The filmmakers of the Toronto New Wave of the 1980s were surfing choppy local waters in terms of financing and distribution, and Patricia Rozema’s marvellously buoyant art-world satire takes commodification and ambition as its subject.

The travails of amateur shutterbug and self-described ‘Girl Friday’ Polly (Sheila McCarthy) as she navigates her hometown’s nascent gallery scene – and crosses paths with culture vultures hovering above the fray – speak with halting, klutzy eloquence to a moment when Toronto’s filmmakers were determined not to sell themselves out.

Director: Guy Maddin

Set on the prairies in a pre-Confederation period perfectly suited to Guy Maddin’s sweetly archaic sensibilities, Tales from the Gimli Hospital unfolds as a two-hander. Its protagonists are a pair of addled in-patients swapping tall tales in between invasive medical procedures.

Shot on 16mm black-and-white film in dual thrall to pre-code Hollywood and the surrealist stylisation of David Lynch, Maddin’s debut was rejected from film festivals and embraced by weirdos, transforming its director into a cult figure and Winnipeg into patient zero for an eccentric new strain of English-Canadian cinema.

Director: Mina Shum

The 1990s saw a glut of comedies dealing with the experiences of second-generation Canadians caught between immigration and assimilation; the title of Mina Shum’s ebullient first feature alludes to the desire and difficulty of trying to have things both ways. For Jade (Sandra Oh), an aspiring actress living in Vancouver, the pleasures of fitting in are as booby-trapped as the restrictive but loving family traditions she’s obliged to navigate like landmines.

The sure-footedness of Double Happiness’s character study is at once a matter of clever writing (the dialogue is delectable in English and Cantonese) and Oh’s fully luminous star performance, which won her a Genie Award for Best Actress. It also informed her casting nearly 30 years later in Domee Shi’s Pixar hit Turning Red (2022), in which she voiced a Chinese-Canadian mother stewing over her own daughter’s immersion in the proverbial melting pot.

Director: Clement Virgo

The title is a double-entendre, referring to the name of the seductive pirate radio DJ (Sharon Lewis) broadcasting in the background of Clement Virgo’s Toronto-set triptych and the anti-establishment ethos of the film as a whole. Rude’s refusal of Canadian politeness was as revelatory as its focus on a Black diasporic community; the hard-edged subject matter is complemented by symbolic, Biblical imagery recasting the inner city as a modern Babylon.

Director: Zacharias Kunuk

Zacharias Kunuk’s rapturously acclaimed debut feature was also the first movie ever written, directed and acted in the Inuktitut language. Its bow at Cannes in 2001 – where it was received as one of the best films at the festival, winning the Camera d’Or – represented a spectacular breakthrough for Indigenous Canadian cinema.

Atanarjuat’s twisty, magic-realist story of betrayal and revenge within a nomadic Inuit community derives from an ancient folk tale, and the friction between a long-standing oral narrative tradition and thrifty, turn-of-the-millennium digital production – the film was shot on a Betacam in the director’s native Igloolik – gives Atanarjuat its conjoined sense of timelessness and urgency. The centrepiece chase sequence, in which the eponymous protagonist is pursued across a seemingly endless expanse of melting ice floes, remains iconic: a frostbitten vision of survival by any means necessary, where the need for speed becomes life-affirming.

Director: Matt Johnson

“We’re just here for the bad guys,” insists wannabe auteur Matt (Matt Johnson) in his action-movie pastiche AV-class project: a harmless (or is it?) piece of homemade Tarantino cosplay about righteous avengers mowing down obnoxious villains. 

The mock-documentary textures echo Johnson’s star-making cult web series Nirvanna the Band the Show, except with a more malevolent sense of complicity. The Dirties is a virtuoso exercise in trolling that accesses real sources of anxiety and terror. Its power derives from the clarity with which its handheld camera observes a world made out of blurred lines: not just fact and fiction but also victims and bullies, friendship and co-dependency, and, most unsettlingly of all for Johnson’s Criterion-ised target demographic, psychosis and cinephilia.

Director: Ashley McKenzie

Not a horror movie as such, but still harrowing all the same, Nova Scotia director Ashley McKenzie’s award-winning first feature unfolds via a series of cramped, off-centre compositions that immediately pose a challenge to viewer expectations: we’re pulled in and pushed away simultaneously.

This two-hander about a pair of co-dependent, unhoused methadone users – lovers as much in thrall to their mutual habit as each other – treats addiction not as a tragic state of grace but just one more self-destructive compulsion among many. The finely gradated interactions between the protagonists and different representatives of various institutional establishments boldly place empathy and ambivalence side by side.

Blue Heron is in UK cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 26 June.