Fasten your bindings, because Sundance 2009 presents an unprecedented moment for Canadian film abroad. With four films heading to competition — two each in the World Documentary and World Dramatic strands — and a fifth feature in the Spectrum sidebar, Canadian filmmakers are flying the flag as never before at the U.S. festival.

(Stranger still is the absence of a film in French. When the Yanks celebrate our movies they are usually in Canada’s other official language.)

Being Canadian, the films are rich in variety, reflecting not just our cultural mosaic but the world’s.

Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal’s documentary Nollywood Babylon is about the booming no-budget cinema of Nigeria; while Paul Saltzman’s Prom Night in Mississippi chronicles the first inter-racial prom at a small-town high school in the American South. The Spectrum title is a Canada/Germany coproduction, Helen, written and directed by German filmmaker Sandra Nettelbeck (Mostly Martha) and coproduced by Vancouver-based Insight Film Studios. It features Ashley Judd as a psychiatrist struggling to heal herself.

The dramatic competitors are no less diverse: Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu’s Inuktitut-language drama Before Tomorrow is a harrowing story of a grandmother and grandson struggling to survive in the frozen north.

But the strangest film of the bunch is the most — dare one say it? — Canadian. Victoria Day. Here’s the blurb from the press release:

‘It is May 1988 in Toronto. The school year is coming to a close. The Victoria Day long weekend heralds the beginning of summer. In Boston, Wayne Gretzky’s dynastic Edmonton Oilers are playing in the Stanley Cup Finals. Best of all, Bob Dylan is coming to town.’

The holiday is meaningless in any other country; the principal setting is a hockey rink; the place is Toronto; the central character is the son of immigrants.

But the debut feature director David Bezmozgis has dismissed these concerns, and rightly so. Bezmozgis has already transcended the parochialism that often dogs Canadian storytellers. His collection of short fiction, Natasha and Other Stories, is set in Toronto; many of the stories have been published without national incident in The New Yorker and Harper’s. This is a hopeful reflection of a new generation of artists who are unfazed by Canada’s absence on the radar of U.S. popular culture. A collective ‘so what?’

Charlotte Mickie, managing director of Entertainment One International, is selling the film at Sundance. ‘There’s a dearth of good movies about adolescence that are realistic or thoughtful. Yes, Canadians will see themselves in this movie, but it works on a universal level. Everybody has had those agonizing and amazing moments in adolescence.’ She adds, ‘I was never a teenaged boy playing hockey, but I identified with those moments in high school.’

Denis Seguin previews Canada’s banner year at Sundance all this week, continuing Tuesday with a closer look at Before Tomorrow.