‘It’s noisier this year’: National Canadian Film Day embraces the elbows-up era | Canada Voices

Sharon Corder, a fifth-generation Texan and tireless champion of Canadian cinema, likes to compare a film to a dream.

“It would be very weird if every night you went to bed and you dreamed about the rich family down the street. And you never dreamed about yourself or your family, just always these other people. That would be very dislocating; it would make you feel like you didn’t exist.”

That is Corder’s metaphor to explain why everybody needs some local film in a cultural diet heavy on Hollywood fare.

Corder and her husband Jack Blum are the founders of Reel Canada, which organizes screenings of Canadian films for high school students and new Canadians. They also run National Canadian Film Day, an international event featuring hundreds of screenings in cinemas, theatres, libraries, embassies and consulates, most of them free. The exhibitors sign up and organize locally while Reel Canada gets them access to numerous Canadian films. Titles include popular classics such as John and the Missus (1987), The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) and new darlings such as 2024’s award-winning Universal Language, in which director Matthew Rankin reimagines Winnipeg as a bilingual French-Farsi community.

“It’s a specific way to respond to the moment and to embrace Canadianness,” Corder said of the event. “It’s noisier this year.”

In the “elbows-up” atmosphere of revived nationalist sentiment, the event, scheduled for Wednesday, is proving more popular than ever. Corder and Blum expect to break their 2017 record, when they got extra funding for Canada 150 and boasted 1,800 screenings. The organizers are offering about 200 different titles and expect 100,000 people to attend in-person screenings with many independent cinemas participating and Cineplex donating 31 screens in 20 venues across Canada. Streamers and broadcasters also sign on, drawing an estimated two million viewers.

Many events are organized by local film festivals and feature guest appearances from directors and stars. For example, the Vancouver International Film Festival is hosting My American Cousin to celebrate the 40th anniversary of that popular title, and a Q&A with its director Sandy Wilson.

Vancouver is also one of several cities that have decided one day for the event is not enough, dubbing it National Canadian Film Week, with VIFF offering 18 features. The Yukon Film Society in Whitehorse is hosting 11 screenings while the Aeolian Hall Musical Arts Association in London, Ont., has eight.

The event is also celebrated in Quebec, where Mediafilm, a non-profit rating and cinema promotion body, does the programming for Reel Canada. This year, there is a particularly strong lineup of French-language offerings with screenings across the province of Patrice Sauvé’s heartwarming La petite et le vieux (Blue Sky Jo) and Maurice, Serge Giguère’s revealing new documentary about hockey player Maurice Richard. There are about 100 French-language screenings in Quebec and another 130 elsewhere in Canada and aboard, including 11 screenings in eight French cities.

Events abroad are often hosted by Canadian embassies but local cinephiles also organize screenings, with strong interest in Latin America. The Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo, Uruguay is screening Universal Language, which will also be seen in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Argentina and Chile.

The Queen of My Dreams, Fawzia Mirza’s 2023 cross-cultural, cross-generational Pakistani-Canadian romance has been selected by hosts in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Several embassies, meanwhile, have chosen Singing Back the Buffalo, a new documentary about the fight to restore the herds by Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard.

There is a great range of stories here, which is the point of the event. Not seeking to define Canada but to explore it, Corder and Blum figure stories are how you make sense of the world.

“We believe storytelling is everything,” said Corder, while Blum added: “A story is one plus two equals three; it creates a narrative sense out of events that might not otherwise be connected and that brings a bit of order into a hugely chaotic world. It’s a deep, deep need.

“And it expresses values. Does the hero win at the end? And if the hero wins, is it because he’s stronger, or is it because he’s smarter, or is it because she is more compassionate?”

Blum points out the contradiction between the current concern with onscreen representation of Black, Asian, Latino and female characters in American film and the industry’s thoughtless acceptance that Canadians rarely see themselves on screen. In the 11 years since the pair launched the event, Blum feels acceptance of Canadian film has grown, but the fragmentation of entertainment and the isolation of audiences continues to challenge the idea of a national cinema.

“It’s harder to get people,” he said. “The big signposts of the culture are fewer. We still have sports, but on the cultural side, we are not just more diverse, but also more siloed.”

The idea of a day on which to watch Canadian films was actually born from a joke. Reel Canada had commissioned a few posters, designed like retro travel ads, to celebrate Canadian cinema, and when an exhibitor asked what they were promoting, Blum thought fast. In 2013, Reel Canada had happened to hold simultaneous screenings in Vancouver, Saskatoon and Charlottetown. “National Canadian Film Day,” he replied, and went back to the office to tell Corder they had a new event to organize.

Coincidentally, both Blum and Corder are dual U.S.-Canadian citizens; she grew up in the United States and abroad before following a boyfriend to Vancouver; he grew up in Canada with an American father. But their Canadian elbows are well up these days, as they discuss the difficulty of finding lemons not grown in the U.S. and debate what subscriptions should be cancelled.

Of course, there are several U.S. screenings for National Canadian Film Day, with the Minneapolis St. Paul Film Society hosting three, while Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania will show Bergers (Shepherds), Sophie Deraspe’s surprising film about a young Quebecker learning to herd sheep in France.

Perhaps the most unusual screening will take place at The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the border between Vermont and Quebec and will be showing Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, the 2010 film about Canadian twins discovering their Middle Eastern roots. Don’t read too much into the opera house’s layout, but the projector is in the United States, while the screen is in Canada.

For a full list of screenings scheduled for Wednesday see canfilmday.ca.