Quebecois thugs, a hardscrabble Newfoundland adolescent and a vampiric rock band are among the distinctly Canuck characters starring in the Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming Canadian Front.

The New York museum’s seventh annual showcase will feature the Quebec blockbuster De père en flic, Sherry White’s story about a Newfoundland teenager Crackie, and Rob Stefaniuk’s Suck, which follows a Canadian rock band who achieve celebrity by becoming vampires.

The senior curator of MoMA’s film department, Canadian-born Laurence Kardish, tells Playback Daily he wanted to program both popular and auteur works so New York audiences would understand the breadth of Canadian film culture. ‘The Canadian film scene is complex,’ he notes.

Perhaps because he’s been immersed in it for the better part of the decade as the main organizer of Canadian Front, Kardish is hard-pressed to comment on what makes Canadian cinema Canadian. ‘Quebec is very specific because of its language and the way its cinema evolved. And there are so many other original regional voices it’s very difficult to generalize,’ he says.

Two other Quebec films will be featured: Bernard Émond’s La donation, a moving drama about a troubled Montreal doctor, and Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, the controversial retelling of the Dec. 6, 1989 mass murder at a Montreal university.

Kardish also selected Only, a film written and directed by Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds about two lonely preteens in a small Ontario town.

The featured docs are Brigitte Berman’s look at the notorious founder of Playboy magazine: Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel — which features interviews with Hefner, Gene Simmons, Mike Wallace and Reverend Jesse Jackson — and Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands, by media artist Peter Mettler

As a tribute to the late Allan King, Kardish is screening the director’s first feature, 1977’s Who Has Seen the Wind, a classic based on the novel by W.O. Mitchell, starring Brian Painchaud, Helen Shaver and Gordon Pinsent

The Canadian Front runs March 17-22.