‘Everything Old Is New Again’ should be the tune on the lips of filmmakers DonOwen and Michel Brault. These two pioneers of Canadian filmmaking will have their first features revived at TIFF 2005. New 35mm prints of Brault’s Entre la mer et l’eau douce (Between Sweet and Salt Water) and Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye have been struck and TIFF will be the first to screen them.

Quebec’s Brault, at 77 also a noted cinematographer, last directed a feature with 1999’s Quand je serai parti… vous vivrez encore, while Toronto-born Owen, 69, has not made a feature since Turnabout in 1988.

Hailed as ‘one of the major films of the ’60s’ by film scholar Peter Morris, Entre la mer et l’eau douce traces the love life and emerging career of a singer who leaves his small town in Quebec to find success in Montreal. His affair with a beautiful waitress, played by Geneviève Bujold, is the emotional highlight of the well-played drama. Brault enlisted the help of Denys Arcand and Claude Jutra in the creation of the script for his 1967 feature, which is this year’s Canadian Open Vault presentation. As with past Open Vault films such as Goin’ Down the Road and Mon oncle Antoine, Brault’s film will be released in theaters this fall and on DVD soon afterward.

Owen, whose 1964 feature Nobody Waved Goodbye won awards at festivals in London and New York upon its initial release, is the subject of TIFF’s annual Canadian Retrospective. Sixteen of Owen’s films will be screened, including Unfinished Business (1984), Owen’s sequel to Nobody Waved Goodbye, and like its precursor, about teenage rebellion.

Also on tap are the odd-couple, blue-collar girl drama Notes for a Film about Donna and Gail (1966), featuring a young Jackie Burroughs; the Canadian Film Award-winning drama The Ernie Game (1967); and the artist profiles Snow in Venice (1971) with Michael Snow; Monique Leyrac in Concert (1965) and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965), a much-loved look at the Montreal icon as a very hip young poet.

Steve Gravestock, associate director of Canadian special projects for the TIFF Group, has written Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and His Culture, a book that will be launched in tandem with the fest program.

‘Thematically, Owen is a crucial figure. He established many of the motifs in the ’60s that were taken up 20 years later by filmmakers like Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema and Clement Virgo. Like them, he portrays cities as bleak, alienating places. Owen was the first filmmaker to address the stuffy, WASP nature of English-Canadian society. And he incorporated European notions of foregrounding the cinema into his narratives.’

Owen was not only influenced by European auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, but Brault and Jutra, his contemporaries at the National Film Board, also played a major role in his stylistic development.

‘Owen spent 10 years in Montreal at the board,’ Gravestock points out. ‘He worked a bit on La Lutte (Wrestling),’ an NFB cinema direct doc codirected by Brault and Jutra, among others. Gravestock thinks it’s fitting that the first features by Brault and Owen should be screened in the same year. ‘Despite the fact that these films are 40 years old, they don’t feel remote when you view them. There is a certain naiveté in the filmmaking, but the ethos and atmosphere of the cities – Montreal and Toronto – are nicely evoked.’

Gravestock echoes the complaint of programmers and archivists around the world when he points out that the Canadian Retrospective and Open Vault programs often have to deal with the hard question, ‘Where are the elements?’ Striking new 35mm prints of older films can only occur if the original film footage is still relatively intact.

That is why the recent acquisition by the TIFF Group’s Film Reference Library of film elements, scripts and production files from directors Peter Lynch, Peter Rowe, Bruce Sweeney and Clement Virgo is noteworthy. When those filmmakers are ready for retrospectives, their materials will have been properly archived for decades.