It might be a stretch to compare Slamdance to the Directors Fortnight but, then again, mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow. Just as the Fortnight was established as a protest to the bourgeois conventions of the Cannes Film Festival, Park City’s other festival launched in 1995 with a similar agenda: a truly independent festival for truly independent filmmakers.

Fourteen years later it has come much further than most would have anticipated — with discoveries including Christopher Nolan of Memento, Marc Forster with Monster’s Ball and Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite.

While Canada enjoys a tremendous showing at Sundance 2009, the Canadian contingent at Slamdance is equally strong, with five features in competition slots.

The narrative competition features the world premiere of Max Perrier’s The Ante, a film noir meets western about a sad sack who takes a wrong turn on a dirt road and the mountain of trouble he stirs up. The tag line is impressively mordant: ‘a brainless high-stakes game of loser-loses-all.’ Written by Danek S. Kaus, James Chancellor and Simon Perrier, it’s produced by director Perrier and Valerie Gagnon of Montreal’s Peter Proffit Pictures

Another narrative competitor is Simon Ennis’ You Might as Well Live, written by Ennis and Josh Peace and produced by Ari Lantos of Serendipity Point Films and Jonas Bell Pasht of ABP Productions. This film, too, accentuates the dark: having failed in his suicide attempt, the picaresque anti-hero is thrown out of the depression ward in a mental hospital for being too happy.

The third narrative competitor is Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds’ Only. A premiere at Toronto, it follows a day in the life of a 12-year-old boy who meets a 12-year-old girl and the ensuing melding of hearts and minds. Veninger and Reynolds wrote and produced the film through their Toronto-based Punk Films.

The fourth competitor is Son of the Sunshine, directed by Ryan Ward, written by Ward and Matthew Heiti for Pangaea Pictures of Toronto. A man undergoes experimental treatment for a debilitating illness only to discover that the efficacy of the treatment is robbing him of a divine ability.

The fifth Canadian title screens in the Documentary Feature competition, although, at 51 minutes, Alison McAlpine’s Second Sight pushes the envelope on what is considered feature-length. A premiere at Hot Docs last year, the Canada/Scotland coproduction is poet/playwright McAlpine’s first. She also produced and edited. Described as a cinematic, nonfiction ghost story, it is executive produced by Peter Wintonick and John Walker.