Tracey Deer’s Beans, Michelle Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian and Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor are among the features selected by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for its annual Top Ten list.

Each year the festival picks 10 features and 10 shorts to recognize as the cream of the crop of Canadian storytelling. The 2020 list includes seven first or second features with 40% of features directed or co-directed by women and 50% of shorts directed or co-directed by women. Of the filmmakers, six are a person of colour and three are Indigenous.

Several of the films selected were featured in Canadian film festivals, including TIFF, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Hot Docs and Inside Out. The feature films largely come from Ontario, with a handful from Quebec.

Deer’s Beans (EMA Films), which was the second runner up for the TIFF People’s Choice Award, is among the Top 10 features, alongside Telefilm’s Oscar selection Funny Boy (Hamilton-Mehta Productions), directed by Deepa Mehta.

Two Sundance premieres, Cronenberg’s Possessor (Rhombus Media, Rook Films) and Sean Durkin’s copro The Nest (Elevation Pictures, BBC Films, Element Pictures) made the list, as well as Cannes selection Nadia, Butterfly (Nemesis Films), directed by Pascal Plante. Rounding out the scripted features are TIFF selection Fauna, directed by Nicolás Pereda, and Evan Morgan’s The Kid Detective (JoBro Productions, Woods Entertainment).

Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian (90th Parallel), which won TIFF’s People’s Choice Documentary Award this year, is among the documentary features selected, alongside Mike Hoolboom’s Judy Versus Capitalism and Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt’s No Ordinary Man (Parabola Films).

The shorts selected this year feature work from several different provinces. Among the Ontario selections are three TIFF winners, Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s Black Bodies, Tiffany Hsiung’s Sing me a Lullaby and Paul Shkordoff’s Benjamin, Benny, Ben. The Quebec shorts are Vincent Toi’s Aniksha, Omar Elhamy’s Foam (Écume) and Alex Anna’s Scars; from Manitoba are Theola Ross’ êmîcêtôcêt: Many Bloodlines and Stump The Guesser by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson. Rounding out the selections are Nova Scotia short How to Be at Home by Andrea Dorfman and Ontario/B.C. short The Archivists by Igor Drljača.

“In the wake of one of the most challenging years our industry has ever seen, TIFF is glad to celebrate these phenomenal Canadian filmmakers,” said Cameron Bailey, artistic director and co-head of TIFF, in a statement. “The films selected to the TIFF Canada’s Top Ten list are of the moment and embody the rich storytelling and perspectives we need right now.”

The Nest and Possessor are currently available to rent via TIFF’s streaming platform, with plans to release the other selections in the near future. The festival dropped its annual Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival in 2018 in favour of recognizing selected films throughout the year at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. The theatre is currently closed due to provincial government restrictions in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.