TIFF’s opening night delights with some patriotic surprises

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It has been too long since the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival had anything to do with Canada.

Back when the event was known as the Festival of Festivals, organizers tended to take special care to ensure that the very first movie that audiences saw each year came courtesy of homegrown artists, with 24 Canadian films filling the opening-night slot over TIFF’s first three decades. Yet in the past 15 years, just two Canadian films – one a documentary about Robbie Robertson and The Band, the other a musical about, well, hockey – have kicked off the city’s annual celebration of cinema and celebrity.

But TIFF’s curious indifference to Canadiana was flipped on its head (its tuque?) on Thursday night for the festival’s 50th edition, with a triple hit of homegrown heroes taking centre stage, one after the other, in a veritable blast of elbows-up-era patriotism. What’s more: each of the films was genuinely good, as opposed to merely good-for-you.

The evening started off with some decently earned sentimentality and flag-waving as TIFF played host to the world premiere of John Candy: I Like Me, a new documentary about the life and legacy of one of Canada’s comedy heroes.

While the project isn’t exactly Canadian in nature – it was funded by MGM Prime Video out of Hollywood, and directed by Colin Hanks, son of the definitely-not-Canadian Tom – it arrived in Toronto all but draped in the Maple Leaf.

The doc’s producer and B.C. native Ryan Reynolds introduced the film during its Princess of Wales premiere while sporting a “Canada” T-shirt, while Hanks proclaimed on stage that the filmmaking team had chosen Toronto for the premiere because it reflected the lyrics of Candy’s favourite song: O Canada. (The room was so full of patriotic love that few seemed to notice the brief protest that occurred in the orchestra section, when demonstrators unfurled a banner decrying RBC’s sponsorship of the festival, saying the bank funds “wildfires, bombs and stolen land.”)

If that show of domestic pride weren’t enough, though, then the film’s second gala screening, at the larger Roy Thomson Hall across the street, was, prefaced by a semi-surprise appearance from Prime Minister Mark Carney, who immediately secured the room’s stand-on-guard-for-thee attention.

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“In many of his movies, there would have been a scene where John would pivot, having been pushed too far,” Carney said onstage, before taking a not-so-subtle dig at Canada’s own bully-in-chief down south. “Don’t push a Canadian too far, someone richer, someone more powerful, someone more arrogant, I don’t know.”

While the Candy doc received a warm and polite response from TIFF’s audience – even if it frequently dipped into unfettered reverence, as if a family home-movie project was underwritten by one of the biggest studios in Hollywood – the onscreen Canadiana went into artistic overdrive as the evening carried on.

If you ran quickly enough from the final few seconds of the 6 p.m. Candy doc screening, for instance, you would have made it just in time for the 8:30 p.m. world premiere of Mile End Kicks a few doors east at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, where Toronto filmmaker (and one-time Globe and Mail contributor) Chandler Levack brought the house down with her tale of a clueless Anglophone music critic trying to make a go of it in Montreal.

The follow-up to her 2022 hit comedy I Like Movies, Levack’s new film had the sold-out crowd caught in a sweaty, sexy, witty, and sometimes painfully (and intentionally) awkward vortex of emotions, all backgrounded by gorgeous, sun-dappled shots of Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood (and a few corners of Toronto and Burlington, Ont., too).

But nothing could have prepared TIFF’s audiences for the hardcore CanCon – complete with a whole new level of CN Tower chaos – that is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

After making its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., earlier this spring, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s time-travel buddy comedy struck the sold-out, primed-for-anything crowd at the Royal Alexander just after midnight like a lightning bolt.

For all of the other criticisms and missteps that you can label at the film festival, the evening felt like a genuine metropolitan touchstone. Which is perhaps why Mayor Olivia Chow presciently decided to attend the Nirvanna screening, even if it meant wiping clean her next-day agenda, given that the show didn’t let out until well past 2:30 a.m.

“The regionality of something like this, although to us seems so pathetic, like oh why are you showing our city, it’s so ugly and disgusting. Other countries, they don’t think like that,” Johnson said during the film’s post-screening Q&A session.

“The specificity of our city is no longer a drawback the way it maybe was in the ’90s and early 2000s. Four Germans came up to me after the screening in SXSW and said, ‘My god, this movie is unbelievable. So much jaywalking!’”