The pyrotechnics of human relationships is the underlying theme in TIFF 2005’s Canada First! program.

Love, sex, betrayal, coming-of-age and families drive the storylines for the 10 features in the festival’s showcase for first-time feature directors and those presenting a feature at TIFF for the first time. From program opener Louise Archambault’s Familia (see story, p. 29), an exploration of mother-daughter relationships, to Dylan Akio Smith’s sexual traffic jam The Cabin Movie, it’s as though Canada First! entrants struck a pact to turn their collective lens on the human condition.

Steve Gravestock, TIFF’s associate director of Canadian special projects, says that while it wasn’t planned that way, this year’s selections do seem to share an over-arching focus. ‘Thematically, the family dynamic is one thing these movies share,’ he notes. ‘I think filmmakers are just tapping into the general uncertainty in the world. People seem to be pulling back to what they know, and that’s family.’

The second annual Canada First! lives up to its mission of spotlighting rising talent, with a lineup of some of the industry’s most buzz-worthy up-and-comers. Among them is Vancouver-based filmmaker Julia Kwan, who earlier this year was pegged by Playback as one of 2005’s 10 to Watch.

Eve and the Fire Horse, her $2-million first feature, is the tale of two young girls (Phoebe Kut and Hollie Low) engaged in a spiritual quest as their family is rocked by a series of misfortunes. Kwan is best known for her critically acclaimed short Three Sisters on Moon Lake (2001).

Mongrel Media has signed on as Eve’s Canadian distributor, and Kwan is currently working on a short film called Smile, financed by CHUM and CBC.

Fellow West Coaster Aubrey Nealon, who, like Kwan, graduated from the Canadian Film Centre, dug into his own past for the semi-autobiographical The Simple Curve (previously known as Idaho Peak), the story of the son of a draft dodger who is anxious to escape his remote B.C. hometown, starring Kris Lemche, Michael Hogan and Matt Craven.

‘My father was a hippy draft dodger; I did grow up in a small B.C. town – but all similarities end there,’ says Nealon. Instead, Curve’s story is about the dynamic between the ’60s generation and their children, ‘where the child is the parent and the parent acts like a child.’

The $1.4-million feature is his first, but Nealon has already made his mark. In 2002, his script for Curve won the Writers Guild of Canada’s 2002 Jim Burt Screenwriting Prize, and, on the strength of his shorts In Memoriam, Abe’s Manhood and House Arrest, he won the 2004 Don Haig Award, an annual $10,000 prize given to a promising Canadian filmmaker.

Montreal’s Domino Film and Television is Curve’s distributor, and Nealon hopes exposure at TIFF will lead to a broad theatrical release in late fall.

John Hazlett’s These Girls continues in the darkly humorous vein of the two Gary Burns films Hazlett has produced – the cult fave The Suburbanators (1995) and Kitchen Party (1997).

A coming-of-age tale with a kinky twist, These Girls is the story of a married man, played by David Boreanaz, best known for his role on the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose character becomes the target of three amorous young women (Caroline Dhavernas, Amanda Walsh and Holly Lewis).

‘I like comedy that has a dark underbelly, although this movie doesn’t wear its darkness on its sleeve,’ says Hazlett, who describes the film as a ‘disarmingly frank look at teen sexuality that’s also a comedy.’

With distributor Seville Pictures already on board the copro between Moncton, NB’s Grana Productions and Montreal’s Productions Jeux d’Ombres, Hazlett hopes to stir up enough TIFF buzz to land a U.S. deal.

Meanwhile, the darkness in David Christensen’s Six Figures slaps you right in the face. Adapted from the book by Fred Leebron, it’s the story of a man facing midlife crisis and financial ruin (played by JR Bourne), who becomes the prime suspect after his wife (Caroline Cave) is brutally beaten.

‘It’s an engaging story most can identify with,’ says Christensen, who had little trouble transposing the story from a boomtown in North Carolina to his native Calgary, Canada’s boomtown capital. ‘Everyone at some point feels like they’re living in the land of six figures, where everyone is doing better than themselves.’

Christensen found fate played a strong role in his movie’s creation. First off, he ordered the gritty novel by accident over the Internet, then became intrigued by the story. Then, last fall, when production ground to a halt after the original distributor closed its doors, Seville stepped in on the $1.3-million picture. ‘It just had the feeling of something that had to be made,’ he says.

Christensen is somewhat of a TIFF veteran, having preemed his short dramatic film Fit at the fest, and returning in 2001 with the feature Solitude, which he produced.

Another hard-luck story is Vancouver journalist Michael Mabbott’s The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico, a mockumentary that tracks the rise and bloody fall of a country music ‘legend.’ Terrifico, starring newcomer Matt Murphy, blurs the lines between fantasy and reality with cameos from real-life musical legends Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm. The film, produced by Toronto’s Darius Films, already has a distributor in Odeon Films and received favorable notices at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX.

Rounding out Canada First! is Fetching Cody, a fantasy comedy by B.C. director David Ray about a street kid who goes back in time to save his girlfriend; Quebec director Denis Côté’s Les États nordiques, about a Montreal man who ends the life of his terminally ill mother; and Robin Aubert’s supernatural thriller Saint-Martyrs-des-Damnés, in which residents of a small Quebec village keep mysteriously disappearing.