CANADIAN FILM FEST - 2025
Canadian Film Fest (CFF), the indie-spirited festival dedicated to celebrating Canadian filmmakers, today announced its lineup for the 2025 edition of the festival. Now in its 19th year, CFF continues to champion and support our country’s creatives and homegrown talent, bringing Canadian stories to Canadian audiences. This year, the festival will be showcasing 16 features and 50 shorts. Tickets go on sale March 10 and can be purchased at canfilmfest.ca. CFF returns to Cineplex’s Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto and runs from March 24-29, 2025.
This year, CFF welcomes films from across Canada, with feature films from British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The festival kicks off with Naomi Jaye’s award-winning film Darkest Miriam, an adaptation of Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Reporter, starring Britt Lower (Severance, Man Seeking Woman) and Tom Mercier (Synonyms, The Animal Kingdom). The film tells the story about a librarian who lives in a fog of grief while working at the Allen Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Libraries.
Below are capsule reviews of select films, and screeners provided courtesy of the CFF.
Capsule Reviews of Select Films:
DARKEST MIRIAM (Canada 2024) ***
Directed by Naomi Jaye
Selected as the Opening Night film for the Canadian Film Fest, the quirky DARKEST MIRIAM is set in and around Allen Gardens in downtown Toronto.
Librarian Miriam Gordon (Britt Lower) lives in a fog of grief while working amidst marginalized members of the public who populate the Allen Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Libraries. When a burgeoning love affair with Janko, a younger foreign cab driver (Mercier), coincides with her receiving a series of oddly threatening letters addressed to her, Miriam’s sheltered existence is cracked open. The story revolves around the many characters who weave in and out of Miriam’s life, her life is as odd as Allen Gardens existing in bustling downtown Toronto. Director Jaye uses Allen Gardens well, except the titular dog park is missing. Though the film occasionally seems aimless, all over the place, the quirkiness of the piece still warrants an audience’s attention.
GOLD BARS: WHO THE F*CK IS UNCLE LUDWIG? (Canada 2024) ***
Directed by Billie Mintz
Montreal lawyer Glenn Joseph Feldman risks his reputation and faces a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit after accusing his former business partner of living off Nazi Gold stolen from the Holocaust. But when his concerned daughter Alex reluctantly joins the investigation to help her father, she confronts unreliable evidence and her father’s moral contradictions, uncovering a truth far more personal and complicated than she imagined. The key question is whether the whole theft of the Nazi gold is true. It turns out that the doc shows that the investigation is more intriguing than the truth. The conspiracy theory cooked up by Feldman, the relationship between father and daughter, and the tracing of Ludwig are all interesting enough, though the amount of information provided to the audience can be quite overwhelming and a bit confusing at times. Still, there is quote bait of humour as implied by the film title, in this doc with many re-enactments.
TO THE MOON (Canada 2024) ***
Directed by Kevin Hartford
Quirkiness is the word of the day for this quirky film from Nova Scotia, which begins with a father and daughter moon dance that is supposed to prevent the moon from moving away from the earth’s orbit. Closeted single dad Sam (Jacob Sampson) finds his world upended when he meets a handsome stranger. Meanwhile, his daughter Ella (Phoebe Rex) struggles with the challenges of teenagerhood and their writer’s block-suffering neighbour Claire (Amy Groening) tries to mine this offbeat father/daughter duo for source material. An ensemble comedy about love, choreographed dance, kitchen safety, stranger danger, planetary physics, and the idea that it’s never too late in life to figure out who you really are. The story has three protagonists and director Hartford gives each around equal screen time. Though the film tends to be all over the place, there is much humour and as stated, quirkiness that holds one’s interest.
VAMPIRE ZOMBIES … FROM SPACE (Canada 2024) ***½
Directed by Michael Stasko
In the first killing scene in which a farming family’s wife is blasted to death by some beam from a flying saucer after meeting a Dracula-like creature with fangs, the cheesy-looking film looks like a cross among three genres - sci-fi, zombie and vampire. The setting is in the 50’s and 60’s like what old monster movies look like, with farm trucks driven around with characters wearing ‘GREAS E’ like clothes. But this is the purpose of director Stasko who has created a remarkable tribute to old monster movies - making it fun, and entertaining with a few scares added along the way. From the depths of space, Dracula has devised his most dastardly plan yet; turning the residents of a small American town (though this is totally a Canadian film) into his personal army of vampire zombies! A motley crew consisting of a grizzled detective, a skeptical rookie cop, ( a tribute to IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT), a chain-smoking greaser, and a determined young woman band together to save the world. There are a few drags along the way, but the film is still a worthy effort.
