Hometown director Chaz Thorne’s Whirligig will kick off the Atlantic Film Festival’s Canadian film offerings on Sept. 17, organizers said Tuesday.

The comedy, Thorne’s third directorial outing, was shot locally last spring, and portrays a young man whose life is in constant motion, yet gets him nowhere. (Check out Playback‘s past coverage of Whirligig.)

The Atlantic festival’s 30th edition will also screen two new features penned by Josh MacDonald, The Corridor and Faith, Fraud and Minimum Wage, and the John Walker documentary A Drummer’s Dream.

Halifax also scheduled five Atlantic Canadian short film programs over ten days, leading off Sept. 22 with nine films, including The Button, a new short by Picnicface’s Andrew Bush, Mind the Gap by comic-turned-filmmaker Shaun Majumder, and a new short featuring artist Tanya Davis in This Tear is a Word by Walter Forsyth.

The Atlantic festival will also unspool a series of Canadian movies after they bow in Venice and Toronto, including Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats, Bruce MacDonald’s Trigger, and Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbours.

Also unspooling in Halifax is Sturla Gunnarsson’s latest documentary, Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie.