It was around the time that Nate Wilson was having his spinal fluid tapped for a quick $7,000 payday that the filmmaker had an epiphany.
The Toronto director wasn’t thinking about how uncomfortable the medical study was. Nor was he concerned about the next inevitable experiment that he would have to participate in to scrounge up some cash. Instead, as the stinging in his back subsided and the pressure wore off, Wilson was overcome with an urgent revelation about how to finally finish the edit of his new movie.
“At that point, I had been editing for eight months, and was trying to smoosh together this very aesthetic cartoony kind of style mixed with this vérité style, and it was the toughest time. Was this going to come together at all? What was I doing?” Wilson says, recalling the darkest days of production on his eccentric 2023 relationship dramedy, The All Golden. “But as soon as the spinal fluid came out of my back, I thought, well, I really have to finish the movie now, because I can’t do this again. Suddenly it all came together, very intuitively, and it was done in the next three weeks.”
In Nate Wilson's The All Golden, a polyamorous bicycle courier finds out that her older, scholarly boyfriend has been keeping a sinister secret.All Golden/Supplied
Every filmmaker, at one point in their career, swears that their work is the result of years’ worth of blood, sweat and tears. But few can attest to putting their actual bodies, and the fluids within them, on the line quite like Wilson and other members of the New Toronto Bizarre.
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A loose collective of filmmakers in their twenties and thirties whose low-budget (and sometimes no-budget) work emerged from the depths of the pandemic, members of the NTB are largely self-taught, skeptical of the country’s cultural institutions, intensely collaborative with one another and – more often than not – in dire financial straits.
“I did a lot of medical studies to get my rent paid so I’d have more time to work on my movie,” says Braden Sitter Sr., whose surrealist comedy The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (yes, that’s the title) has emerged as one of the group’s breakthrough productions. “I’m always broke and in debt and just barely getting by. I once paid $200 a month to live in a basement hallway for a year-and-a-half. I found a skinny little mattress and it fit in there perfectly. My desk fit right underneath the gas meter, too.”
A paranoid young man launches a bizarre crime spree against Torontonians in The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man.Braden Sitter Sr./Supplied
Spend enough time talking with Sitter, Wilson and their dozen-plus friends, lovers, colleagues and co-conspirators who comprise the NTB, and the financial realities of making films outside of the Canadian system – itself a patchy landscape of independent distributors, occasional bursts of Telefilm money and life-saving arts-council grants – can feel crushing. Especially in a city that, with rapid gentrification, feels increasingly hostile to artists.
Yet that lack of a safety net has also allowed the filmmakers to operate without any weight of expectation or any obligation to tradition, free to deliver singular, bracing DIY work that recontextualizes what we talk about when we talk about Canadian cinema.
Wilson’s The All Golden, for starters, is a disorienting and hilariously absurd portrait of a couple caught in a downward spiral. Sitter’s The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man riffs on a disgusting true-crime tale (a 2019 case in which a Toronto man sporting a construction-site outfit dumped liquid feces on random bystanders) by cutting the ripped-from-the-headlines horror with intense gashes of dark comedy and hallucinatory paranoia. Tristan Wheeler’s Toronto Apartment uses the city’s bleak housing landscape to deliver a deeply anxious farce about class and community. And Karen Knox’s short The Year of Staring at Noses, filmed mostly with an iPhone, plays with the documentary form until it shatters into a thousand jagged pieces.
While their films are not playing this year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, which begins next week, the NTB just might be storming the gates of the Lightbox and other arts institutions sooner than you think. If, that is, they can make next month’s rent.
“There was this frustrated energy in the air.”
Many of the cinematic movements that we associate with the evolution of the medium – like the Movie Brats of the 1970s led by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, or the 1980s Toronto New Wave featuring Don McKellar, Patricia Rozema and Atom Egoyan – came together in fits and starts, a gradual accumulation of connections and collaborations. The New Toronto Bizarre, though, boasts a definitive origin story that can be traced right down to the exact hour.
It was 7 p.m. on Nov. 26, 2021, at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto’s west end, when the (now-defunct) indie screening series K-Fab was hosting a retrospective on the work of experimental L.A.-based filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko. At the time, much of Toronto’s filmgoing community had spent the previous year-and-a-half locked away in their own bubbles, the pandemic shutting off access to moviegoing and to each other.
“There was this frustrated energy in the air because we were all coming out of COVID and just excited to do something,” recalls director and actor Lea Rose Sebastianis, who attended the screening with Wilson, her now-partner. “The screening was so deeply inspiring, and a bunch of us got drinks afterward, and a few of us even made a short with Eugene that weekend. It’s actually really weird to be able to pinpoint when the explosion happened.”
Along with Wilson and Sebastianis, the Paradise screening attracted future NTB players Sitter, Knox, Shelby Wilson, Zachary George, Eli Speigel and Ben Petrie, the last of whom possessed the most industry experience up till then, thanks to the films he’d made alongside his now-wife Grace Glowicki.
Canadian filmmakers and couple, Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie have had films shown at TIFF in last few years.Chloe Ellingson/The Globe and Mail
“I went completely on a whim. It was this brief moment of time just before the Omicron lockdown – looking back, it felt like there was this very precious window to see movies again,” recalls Petrie, who would go on to become something of a guiding light and mentor for the group, acting in Wilson’s The All Golden and Sitter’s TPPPPM. “As soon as I arrived it was clear I was encountering a community that was already bubbling up. There was this pent-up yearning in the crowd.”
From that moment on, the cohort of friends – which would go on to include Wheeler, George, Steffi Tupe, Kalil Haddad, Zachary Lacosse, Ben Roberts, Albert Pham, Solmund MacPherson, Adrian Patterson and Katerina Zoumboulakis, among many others – would regularly meet up for screenings and drinks. Eventually, they began making their own films, modifying the narrative and setting and equipment depending on who was free that day to act in a scene or hold a camera. (The “New Toronto Bizarre” moniker itself would arrive later, coined by freelance writer Quinn Henderson in a 2024 Toronto Star story.)
“Making a movie is so hard, even if it’s the simplest idea. It takes so much emotional, physical, mental energy. We’re all masochists as filmmakers, so that grind is better with friends,” says Zoumboulakis, who notes that informal texts keep everyone in the loop about what might be shooting when. “I also really want to be able to see the movies that we’re talking about making, so if I can help that come to fruition, then that’s exciting.”
A man subleases his place as a 'community space' so he can make rent after a breakup in Tristan Wheeler's Toronto Apartment.Toronto Apartment/Supplied
Of course, having your friends available to help – often for free – is essential when the films are being made for next to nothing. TPPPPM cost just $8,000 when all the postproduction expenses were added up, much of which came courtesy of Sitter’s Mastercard. Toronto Apartment ended up at $10,000, shot over a couple of weekends with a $200 camera. The gritty Spiders Web (co-directed by cousins Ben and Oliver Roberts alongside star/subject Frank (Spider) Dunsten) was made for a relatively whopping $35,000 – but only because, according to Ben, “we paid an absurd amount for a sound mix that was triple what we spent shooting it.”
“The attitude is something like, I don’t have enough money to pay you what you would get if this was a regular gig, but I’ll give you all the help and energy I can if you can do the same for me,” Sitter says. “Not only does this work, but I think it generates better work. You’re running on favours and you need to make it as fun and frictionless as you can for the people helping you. I know everyone is always talking about how there’s no community anymore because everything sucks now, but I don’t really feel that.”
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Making the films is one thing, though, and getting eyeballs on them another. Enter the Bleeding Edge screening series, a spiritual successor to K-Fab that was dreamed up by Toronto programmers Alan Jones and Ethan Vestby in the summer of 2022, as the revolving door of pandemic-era restrictions finally seemed to subside.
A waitress must carry the burden of ferrying her tips across a hostile urban landscape in Yellow Envelopes by Steffi Tupe.Steffi Tupe/Supplied
“A big element for us then and now was having the filmmakers there, so there’s no barrier between the movie and the audience,” says Vestby, who hosted the first Bleeding Edge event at The Pilot bar in Yorkville, which is owned by the uncle of another local filmmaker, Rebeccah Love. “The directors are there chatting before the screening, they’re partying together after, and people are becoming friends and collaborators.”
Eventually, Bleeding Edge moved to the Paradise, which together with the Revue to the west, Eyesore Cinema’s backroom theatre a few blocks to the east, and such emerging semi-secret micro-cinemas as United Unlimited and Market Video in every other direction form a radius of venues eager to program work that other theatres won’t touch.
Although, this reticence among the city’s larger exhibitors is changing, too. Late last year, TPPPPM scored a TIFF Lightbox screening, and Sitter and Wheeler are currently preparing to host a double bill of their movies at the Hot Docs Cinema in two weeks, smack in the midst of TIFF’s 51st festival. (“The most important early September film event of Toronto has arrived!” reads the event’s cheeky promotional copy.)
Bleeding Edge’s pioneering work has also been felt across the country. The nascent Montreal Critics’ Week has platformed several NTB members across its 2025 and 2026 editions. And last year, Nick Workman and J.P. Meldrum formed the screening series and distribution outfit Destroyed Cinema in Victoria, which was no easy feat given B.C.’s antiquated and uniquely costly ratings-board regulations.
“A lot of these filmmakers made their films for $1,000, so for them to pay, say, $120 for a rating for one screening only, that’s a lot,” Workman says. “We’ve helped cover those costs and become advocates for removing the ratings system, which gets convoluted.”
As for the umbrella name of “New Toronto Bizarre,” most members have come to appreciate, or at least tolerate, the label. (“When that first article came out, we were all like, what the heck is going on, but it is really helpful for getting attention,” says Steffi Tupe.) But despite sharing a name, each artist comes to the scene with vastly different influences.
Zachary Lacosse’s Imperial Green is an experiential drama shot in a high-frame rate of 60 per second, as opposed to 24.Imperial Green/Supplied
Lacosse’s Imperial Green, for instance, mixes the “ecstatic truth” docu-fiction of Werner Herzog with the high frame-rate innovation of Ang Lee. Tupe’s short Yellow Envelopes has the unease of a Safdie brothers movie backgrounded by the propulsive city-by-night atmosphere of a Michael Mann film. And Wheeler’s Toronto Apartment filters the anxious humour of Albert Brooks through the no-frills gaze of a Dogme 95 production.
Yet the work does feel unintentionally united by one theme: rejection. These are the visions of artists who have been spurned by – or never even sought approval from – everything that the system represents, from traditional forms of financing to gatekeeping institutions to even production standards such as professional lighting. Taken together, the NTB canon adds up to one big nervy repudiation of whatever has come before.
“It feels like you’re kind of breaking every rule,” says Albert Pham, who helped produce TPPPPM. “That’s what’s so exciting about this – it’s all fuelled by passion, and I found that so infectious. I didn’t even know you could do work like this that is so uncompromising. I didn’t know that you could live like this. That there was this choice between everything that was presented to us.”
That choice, though, is increasingly feeling like no choice at all.
While some filmmakers have inched their way into the more mainstream areas of the industry – Wilson, for instance, was the first assistant director on the hit 2024 slasher In a Violent Nature, while Knox has a new show coming out in the fall with Crave – many have day jobs on the margins of the film industry or completely outside of it. And even then, some are barely scraping by.
“When I got the e-mail to participate in this story, Braden and I were both like, God, you know this couldn’t come at a worse time because we are totally broke,” Wilson says with a tired laugh. “Whatever high we felt of being successful with those independent projects has not generated career paths or anything like that. But I guess we need to just try again.”
Some of Wilson’s friends and colleagues are prepared to keep trying for as long as it takes. But others are keenly aware that they are staring down a future that requires even more sacrifice and hard choices when it comes to the pursuit of their art versus their dreams of, say, starting a family.
“I would love to make movies where I could sustain a relatively normal middle-class existence. To go on vacation once a year, maybe,” Wheeler says.
“When I was editing Toronto Apartment, I was working at a courthouse with victims of major crimes, and before that I was a fishmonger. Maybe that’s been the fuel to make the movie because I’m not complacent with my day job,” he adds. “I think ultimately, though, people who are interested in movies and have money should just give it to us. That’s the pitch!”
Still, some inside the NTB can imagine a path forward in which the system conforms to their visions, not the other way around.
“I think we all have ideas for bigger films, and when we get that, think of how exciting it’s going to be,” Pham says. “I mean, imagine what a million-dollar version of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man looks like? We can have so much fun.”
Just Outside the Bizarre
In addition to the New Toronto Bizarre, there is a wave of emerging, innovative Canadian directors whose work sits just adjacent to that scene, whether owing to their differences in geography, sensibilities, or production and funding structures. Here are three talents to watch.
Louise Weard
Supplied
Based in: Vancouver
Known for: Castration Movie anthology series exploring gender and trans identity, featuring New Toronto Bizarre staples Nate Wilson and Lea Rose Sebastianis
Telling quote: “I think the new crop of Canadian filmmakers, whether aware of it or not, are all in the lineage of Tom Green. There is this dangerous sensibility of playing with the boundary between reality and artifice in these works that extends from the films to the artists themselves.”
Up next: Currently filming the next chapter of Castration Movie.
Carol Nguyen
Romain Rabasa/Supplied
Based in: Montreal
Known for: 2019 short doc No Crying at the Dinner Table, a leap from her DIY stop-motion animated shorts
Telling quote: “I would like to see more development programs for young filmmakers. The pipeline from film school into the industry is rough for those who would like to be writers and/or directors. I find support comes when you have success, but before that, it feels very lonely and discouraging.”
Up next: Feature doc Still Night, Burning House premieres at TIFF next week
Maziyar Khatam
Maziyar KhatamSupplied
Based in: Toronto
Known for: Series of shorts, including lo-fi comedies Bump and The Sweater, and offbeat drama Baba, which premiered at the 2023 edition of Sundance
Telling quote: “We’ve lost a bit of the edgy kind of films Canadians used to make. There were arguments they might have gone too far, but I like how we can sometimes just go for it. No one is doing those kinds of darker films – no one’s out there doing our version of Lars von Trier. That’s what I’m aiming for. Although maybe Nate Wilson is doing something that radical – he’s our Lars.”
Up next: In postproduction on feature directorial debut Rubberneck, costarring New Toronto Bizarre players Karen Knox and Ben Petrie
Canadian Cinema Class of 2016
From left, Matt Johnson, Pavan Moondi, Chelsea McMullan, Kazik Radwanski & Andrew Cividino in 2016.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Ten years ago, The Globe profiled a group of bold, brash millennial filmmakers who could be considered the New Toronto Bizarre’s predecessors. They even came equipped with their own moniker, though the “New New Wave” didn’t quite stick. But the filmmakers certainly remained in the industry, making it their very own. Here’s what they’ve been up to over the past decade.
Andrew Cividino
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Then: Directorial debut Sleeping Giant premiered at Cannes before earning a Best Picture nomination at the 2016 Canadian Screen Awards
Since: Won an Emmy Award for co-directing the series finale of Schitt’s Creek; produced the 2023 thriller Infinity Pool with Film Forge partner Karen Harnisch; directed the 2023 CBC miniseries Essex County
Next: Working alongside Harnisch on a feature-length adaptation of Yann Martel’s short story “We Ate the Children Last”; developing the series Cutblock, about a multigenerational West Coast timber family, with Trey Edward Shults; adapting Naben Ruthnum’s gothic horror novella Helpmeet into a feature that Cividino describes as “The Fly meets Phantom Thread with a dash of It Follows.”
Matt Johnson
Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Then: Made a splash in Sundance with the 2016 mockumentary Operation Avalanche
Since: Following the 2023 hit BlackBerry, released two 2026 films (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the Anthony Bourdain docudrama Tony) to universal acclaim and serious box-office success inside Canada and around the world
Next: Currently filming a Toronto-set journalism thriller starring Finn Wolfhard; developing a large-scale adaptation of fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering for Legendary Entertainment (Dune, Godzilla x Kong)
Chelsea McMullan
Robin L. Marshall/Getty Images
Then: Music doc My Prairie Home was shortlisted for the 2014 Canadian Screen Awards’ best feature-length documentary prize
Since: Delivered two 2022 documentary hits with Ever Deadly (a collaboration with Inuk musician Tanya Tagaq) and Crystal Pite: Angels’ Atlas; conquered the 2023 Canadian festival circuit with National Ballet doc Swan Song
Next: In postproduction on a docu-series about fugitive Ryan Wedding titled Snow King: From Olympian to Narco; in development with Vancouver-based production company Oddfellows on a scripted horror film
Pavan Moondi
Clare Stein/Supplied
Then: Slacker comedies Everyday Is Like Sunday and Diamond Tongues attracted attention in the U.S. alt-comedy scene
Since: Moved into television directing, including the 2024 CBC docu-series Bollywed; recently released the romcom Middle Life starring Leah Fay Goldstein and Peter Dreimanis, the real-life couple behind Canadian rock band July Talk
Next: Adapting a historical non-fiction book into a feature while putting together an “edgy Christmas movie” that he’ll write and direct
Kazik Radwanski
Juanito Aguil/Getty Images
Then: Won over festival audiences from Berlin to Toronto with the 2015 character drama How Heavy This Hammer
Since: Alongside producer Daniel Montgomery, Radwanski turned their production company MDFF into a recurring TIFF screening series and nationwide film distributor, including this year’s drama 100 Sunset; directed two critically adored films, both of which star Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson (Anne at 13,000 ft., Matt and Mara, the latter of which is set for a Blu-ray release around Christmas)
Next: Developing a new script about tennis, “or more specifically a film about an actor who acts in a student filmmaker’s film in exchange for tennis lessons,” says Radwanski, who is also starting a new term at Humber Polytechnic as a film professor. “I see a lot of parallels between tennis and acting, performance, improvisation. I’ve been playing a lot of tennis since the pandemic and coincidentally, my two most frequent partners are Matt Johnson and Andrew Cividino.”