The nine films in TIFF2006’s Canada First! program – a showcase for rookie Canuck feature directors, or those presenting at TIFF for the first time – are driven by misfit characters in false or contrived environments.

‘A sense of displacement and confusion, and people being left behind – and how they interact and create environments – are themes that reverberate through Canada First!,’ notes Steve Gravestock, the festival’s associate director of Canadian programming.

Cheech, the first feature by Quebec TV director Patrice Sauvé, begins with Ron (Patrice Robitaille), the unhappy owner of an escort agency, lying in the snow, listening to relaxation tapes that advise him to picture himself on a beach.

The film, based on an acclaimed play, chronicles what happens to people in Ron’s world on the day his little black book is stolen. The despondent characters include his right-hand man Maxime (Maxime Dénommée), suicidal call girl Stephanie (Fanny Mallette), lonely Olivier (François Létourneau), his preoccupied girlfriend Jenny (Anick Lemay) – whom he doesn’t know is an escort – and his pathetic neighbor Alexis (Maxim Gaudette).

Montrealer Létourneau penned both the play and the movie, produced by Go Films’ Nicole Robert.

Aspiring to direct features since studying film at Concordia University, Sauvé says he chose this work because ‘it was a happy mixture of comedy and tragedy.’

Pointing out that the TV shows he has directed – most notably the multiple-Gemeaux award-winning La Vie, la vie and Grande ourse -­ have been cited for their cinematic approach, Sauvé says it wasn’t a big leap to do a feature film.

‘Making the shift from television to film, I wanted the film to look big and… to give a scope to the characters’ day that was bigger than life,’ he notes.

Financed with the help of Telefilm Canada, SODEC, The Harold Greenberg Fund, Radio-Canada and distributor Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, the $4.5-million Cheech opens in Quebec on Oct. 6. It will be a mid-sized release of 30 to 50 prints, according to Vivafilm’s EVP of acquisitions and sales Patrick Roy, who adds that plans for an English-Canada release hinge on reaction at TIFF.

A Stone’s Throw, Genie Award-winning producer Camelia Frieberg’s feature directorial debut, is a psychological drama she wrote with Victoria’s Garfield Lindsay Miller about eco-activist Jack (Kris Holden-Ried), who arrives on the rural Nova Scotia doorstep of his long-lost sister Olivia (Kathryn MacLellan).

‘They both have to come to terms with how they are dealing with the past, and [the film is about] the conscious choices we make about how we live on the planet, and how we give and receive love,’ says Frieberg. The film also stars Lisa Ray (Water).

The inclusion of A Stone’s Throw at TIFF brings Frieberg full circle. ‘I owe my film career to the festival,’ she proclaims.

While covering the early days of TIFF as a journalist, she interviewed filmmaker Charles Burnett and ended up driving to Los Angeles in ‘a car that broke down about 15 times’ to work as assistant director on his low-budget 1983 film My Brother’s Wedding.

In 1988, she directed the short doc Crossing the River, but is best known as the producer of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter and Jeremy Podeswa’s The Five Senses. She sought helming tips from both directors.

‘It was a very joyous experience,’ Frieberg says of her directing turn. ‘I’m not so keen now to produce other people’s works, as I am my own.’

Frieberg coproduced A Stone’s Throw with Kelly Bray. Shot in 15 days, it was funded by Telefilm, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, HGF, Frieberg’s father, and Canadian distrib ThinkFilm.

Opening Canada First! is Fido (see story, p. T8), which boasts a budget of nearly $11 million, putting it far ahead of the rest. The comedic zombie film, starring Scottish comedian Billy Connolly as one of the living dead, is set in a romanticized 1950s propped up by the slave labor of domesticated zombies.

For Fido director Andrew Currie, TIFF will bring the film what he wants – a really big audience. ‘It is a comedy, and usually with comedies, the bigger the audience, the better,’ he says. ‘I hope the audience embraces the quirkiness of the humor and the oddness of the world.’

Another high-profile entry is Everything’s Gone Green, a $2-million slacker comedy penned by author Douglas Coupland and helmed by Paul Fox (see story, p. T9).

‘I haven’t had a film in Toronto before, and being a Toronto filmmaker, it’s great,’ says Fox of his second feature. Last year, he directed the well-received thriller The Dark Hours, and he’s already at work on his next project, The Mysteries of Ice Fishing, with Sienna Films.

The other entries in Canada First! got made thanks to the directors’ own investment and deferred payments.

Mercy, with a $200,000 budget ($40,000 cash plus $160,000 in deferrals), tells the story of a disenchanted fairy giant sent to Tehran to grant war-related wishes, and is entirely financed by director Mazdak Taebi.

‘I worked really hard as a film technician [as a driver] in Canada for years. The film was made with money I earned in Canada, and I am in huge debt right now. I’m running away from my credit cards,’ says Taebi, who also produces and acts in the film. Previously, he directed four shorts, including Spirit (1990) and After Midnight (1995).

TIFF’s Gravestock describes the adventurous film – set in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and shot from the perspective of surveillance cameras – as an Iranian version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

Filmed entirely in Iran in Farsi and English, Mercy, based on a script by Taebi and Jalal Tehrani, stars Iranians Sadegh Maleki, Shapoor Gharib and Ramin Rastad. The director is working with international sales agent DreamLab Films of France to find a distributor.

While all the other films in Canada First! will make their world premieres at TIFF, Noël Mitrani’s Sur la trace d’Igor Rizzi (On the Trail of Igor Rizzi) will debut one week earlier in the Venice Film Festival’s Critics Week.

Starring French actor and Montreal resident Laurent Lucas, along with locals Isabelle Blais, Pierre-Luc Brillant and Emmanuel Bilodeau, Mitrani’s comical debut follows a former French soccer star who moves to Montreal – hometown of his dead girlfriend – and accepts a job as a hitman after his manager embezzles his money.

Born in Toronto to French parents, Mitrani moved to Paris at age five and remained there for 30 years, returning to Canada a couple of years ago because he ‘prefers the Canadian mentality.’ The self-taught director’s first short, 1999’s After Shave, was made in France.

Igor Rizzi is coproduced by Mitrani’s StanKaz Films and Montreal’s Atopia Production, with sister company Atopia Distribution handling the Canadian release.

‘I invested my personal money to realize the movie I really, really wanted to do,’ says Mitrani, revealing only that the budget is less than $1 million. Atopia came on board later with some post-production funding, and the director is hoping for some Telefilm and SODEC money to cover the deferrals.

It was important for the director to shoot in 35mm, but he could only afford one camera, and so he relied on long takes, a style that he was partial to anyway.

‘I like to give the actors the opportunity to express themselves in long sequences. In general, each shot lasts about two minutes. I have just 180 cuts [in the film]. When I told that to Technicolor, they thought it was a short,’ he recounts.

La coupure, about the impossible love between a brother (Marc Marans) and his married sister (Valérie Cantin), sprang from a book director Jean Châteauvert read about a neuropsychiatrist treating siblings who couldn’t stop their relationship. ‘It’s not about abuse or incest, but the fact they are really in love,’ he explains.

It was difficult for Châteauvert to both produce and direct La coupure, which got Telefilm funding to cover some of its $500,000 budget.

‘The first problem is money,’ he says of wearing both hats in his directorial debut. ‘As a director you’re saying ‘let’s go for another take,’ but as a producer you think you’re going to blow the budget on just one particular take. You become almost schizophrenic.’

Seville Pictures, which contributed $45,000 to the production, is looking to release three prints in Quebec in February 2007.

Also about siblings, Carolyn Combs’ Acts of Imagination tracks the disintegrating relationship between a pair of Ukrainian immigrants – the practical Jaroslaw (Billy Marchenski) and his sister Katya (Stephanie Hayes), who lives partly in an imaginary world.

The film started out with a budget of just $64,000, covered by Combs and her screenwriter and producing partner Michael Springate. But it ballooned to about $400,000 – including deferrals – after Telefilm came on board with $150,000 and B.C. Film with $10,000 in completion funding that allowed it to be blown up to 35mm from digital video.

‘It’s a possibility in a year from now that I’ll say it’s terrible, because we’ll just be carrying so much debt, but the experience was wonderful,’ says Springate. ‘The script development [which began in 1992] was long and to a certain extent painful, unlike the filming, which went fast.’

Springate was inspired by Ukrainian friends and trips to the country: ‘The Ukraine is a border country [next to the former Soviet Union], and in many ways it’s like Canada – a country that is beside an empire, and it is always defining itself against the empire,’ he notes.

For Combs, the timing was right to do the film because she felt stronger as a director after having completed three docs, including 1998’s Stories from the Diner. Cinematographer Steven Deneault assembled the crew, including Thomas Sabinsky from Denmark, who was eager to edit his first feature. The producers hope to find a distributor at TIFF.

Finally, Maurice Devereaux’s low-budget horror flick End of the Line follows a psychiatric ward nurse (Ilona Elkin) as she boards the last train of the night. When it stops in the middle of a tunnel, the murders begin. Devereaux writes, directs, produces and edits the film, with special effects by Adrien Morot, whose credits include The Day After Tomorrow and The Bone Collector.

‘My film has violence in it, but it is about something. It’s not just people getting hacked to pieces,’ the director says. ‘For people who have an attentive eye, it will question and put into light certain ways of [religious] thinking.’

Having previously made the features Lady of the Lake (1998) and Slashers (2001), Devereaux says End of the Line was a step up because it was the first time he worked with unionized actors. No distributor is yet attached to the film, the budget of which Devereaux would not reveal, except to say none of it came from public sources.

The nine features were chosen from about 90 submitted to the festival that were eligible for Canada First!