The Canadian features that played the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival showcased the talents of numerous cinematographers at various stages in their craft and career, from first-timers to returning veterans such as Paul Sarossy, who continues his successful collaboration with Atom Egoyan on Felicia’s Journey.

On some films, camera duties were shared, as with director Cristine Richey’s tops & bottoms, a 16mm documentary tracing the history of sadomasochism and the lifestyle of its practitioners, which lists five shooters in its credits. In the case of Here Am I, a 35mm black-and-white period piece shot in the Balkans, lensing chores are attributed to neophyte codirectors Joshua Dorsey and Douglas Naimer in addition to dop Emil Christov.

While the camera was being passed around on those films, some shooters were pulling double duty. Derek Rogers, hot off his CSC Award-winning work on Cube, shot New Waterford Girl, a dark comedy directed by Allan Moyle (Pump Up the Volume) in which a rebellious 15-year-old girl named Mooney (Liane Balaban) dreams of escaping her repressive East Coast hometown.

New Waterford Girl could not be further in setting or style from the Canadian/Chinese coproduction Dreamtrips, for which Hong Kong-born writer/director Kal Ng enlisted Rogers to shoot the Toronto segments and Gavin Liew to handle those filmed in Asia.

Ng’s reflective foray into the world of virtual reality follows insomniac Jenny (Jennifer Chan) on her nocturnal wanderings through the streets of Toronto, distraught over her fiance’s mysterious disappearance.

Shooting in anamorphic 35mm on a shoestring budget, Ng and Rogers borrow a page from the textbook of Jean-Luc Godard, photographing Toronto’s most modernistic architecture at night, as the French director did in Paris for Alphaville (1965), to create a coldly futuristic landscape without having to construct costly sets.

Dreamtrips takes glorious advantage of the wide-screen format in exploiting the gleaming vastness of such landmarks as the Eaton Centre, Nathan Phillips Square, and Skywalk (effectively standing in for an airport terminal), providing an apt visual extension of Jenny’s sense of isolation.

Images abound that seem to reference the work of some of cinema’s master directors. The sudden appearance of a group of brides and grooms vanishing down a ramp on rollerblades, for example, steers Dreamtrips into the surreal territory of Luis Bunuel (Belle de Jour).

A despondent Jenny stumbles upon Dreamtrips, a cyber game that transports the player to whatever time and place they desire, which in Jenny’s case is her native Hong Kong at the moment she first met Charles (Wayne Kwok), her absent husband-to-be.

As it turns out, Charles himself is navigating through Dreamtrips, and has become so entangled in it that he has crashed the system, leaving his fellow participants stranded in an alternate world formed by their own fears and desires. A scared Jenny reverts to a little girl lost in the desert, attended to by the Dreamtrips guides, clad in bright red uniforms. It is a striking visual contrast to the earlier urban sequences, and strongly recalls the setting and color schemes of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Like Rogers, West Coast dop Robert Aschmann (Kitchen Party) also had two features at tiff, including A Girl Is a Girl, the directorial debut of Last Night editor Reginald Harkema, which trails Trevor (Andrew McIntyre), a young man in search of the ‘ideal’ woman amidst Vancouver’s grunge rock milieu.

The director clearly has an editor’s instincts, shooting with jump cuts and a generally frenetic pace in mind, which allows Aschmann to be loose with the camera, giving the film a ‘fly on the wall’ point of view. The spirit of a young Godard haunts the film, with the filmmakers even going so far as to cop the famous close-up in the coffee cup from Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967).

Aschmann’s other Vancouver project, rollercoaster, was written and directed by Scott Smith (his first feature), and involves self-destructive adolescents whose afternoon spree at an abandoned amusement park is scheduled to culminate in a young couple’s joint suicide.

It is a cross between the self-contained teen group scenario of The Breakfast Club and the cutting-edge nihilism of Kids, and Aschmann’s visual contribution is substantial, both in fleshing out the characters and advancing the narrative, as the screenplay by Smith (his film school buddy) is thin on plot.

Like a kid in a candy store, Aschmann had the entire Pacific National Exhibition fairgrounds at his disposal. In the film, park security guard Ben (David Lovgren) tries to ingratiate himself with the youths by activating the rides, returning later to extort sexual favors from the bullying Stick (Brendan Fletcher of Little Criminals).

As it would be unnatural for the inarticulate Stick to verbalize the inner turmoil triggered by this incident, Smith and Aschmann follow the scene by simply showing the silent Stick riding a rollercoaster. With the camera mounted on the front of the car, the sequence is framed in such a way that the volatile and sexually conflicted boy appears trapped, thrown about by the many bumps and jerks of the ride. The amusement park setting offers the filmmakers many such visual metaphors.

Another film touching on the theme of teen suicide, albeit in a lighter vein, is the wonderful 1960s Montreal period piece Emporte-moi (Set Me Free) from Quebec director Lea Pool.

The national diversity of the names in the credits of this Canadian/Swiss/French coproduction represent all the participating regions, probably so the producers could qualify for grant money from each country, but if that’s one reason why Pool chose French cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie, then it is a blessing, because the latter’s work here is stellar.

Lapoirie is best known for shooting Les Roseaux Sauvages and Les Voleurs for Cahiers du Cinema critic-turned-director Andre Techine, and her style lends this coming-of-age film a visual kinship with French New Wavers Francois Truffaut as well as Godard (anyone see a pattern here?). Scenes from Godard’s 1963 film Vivre Sa Vie even pop up in Emporte-moi, with Pool delightfully intercutting the gestures of that film’s star, Anna Karina, with those of 13-year-old Hanna (Karine Vanasse). Hanna goes back to see Vivre Sa Vie repeatedly, hypnotized by Karina’s prostitute character, who seems just as confused by her identity as Hanna is.

Emporte-moi’s opening image of Hanna floating underwater for a disquietingly long time immediately draws the viewer into her fragile emotional state. Faced with the scary new world of womanhood, Hanna can’t find many around her who seem to care, including her parents. Her father (Miki Manojlovic) is a self-obsessed, unpublished poet, and her seamstress mother (Pascale Bussieres) is unstable and on more than one occasion overdoses on pills in the family bathroom.

Lapoirie’s carefully composed images convincingly evoke the Montreal of the pre-Expo era. Milestones in Hanna’s development are conveyed visually, as in close-ups of the girl’s long hair being snipped off at her father’s behest, exemplifying her involuntary loss of innocence.

In a later scene, lonely Hanna takes her Karina obsession too far, hanging out with streetwalkers and allowing a john to bring her to a sleazy motel room. She becomes frightened and escapes his violent advances, at which point the camera takes on her pov. The hand-held slow-motion shot of Hanna running down the street captures all the frenzied feelings swirling around in her troubled head.

This is a sampling of the Canadian film work that was on view at this year’s tiff. Selections spanned five provinces and various genres and styles – from the gritty naturalism of Rodrigue Jean’s Full Blast, shot by Stefan Ivanov, to the over-the-top goofiness of John Paizs’ b sci-fi spoof Top of the Food Chain, lensed by Bill Wong.

Perspective Canada allows us a glimpse of the images that will flicker across our screens in coming months, and no doubt the buzz generated at the 1999 festival will resonate for some time yet.