Strong contingent of homegrown features at TIFF signals maturing industry

This year’s bumper crop of Canadian movies at TIFF will send people to their basements in search of old program books to see if there has ever been a comparable lineup in the festival’s 32-year history. But they won’t find one quite like it, because this is the year our film industry comes of age.

CANADA FIRST!

Whether it makes you bolt for the vomitorium or head for moral high ground, horror is big business for the entertainment industry.

Director Richie Mehta was so determined to get his passion project made that he was willing to go all the way to India to shoot his debut feature using a prosumer camera that he could fit in the palm of his hand. But that was before he met cinematographer Mitch Ness, whose experience with high-def opened his eyes to the possibilities of the medium.

After a three-year hiatus from directing feature films, Atom Egoyan is back in preproduction on Adoration, a drama set for a Sept. 17 start date in Toronto. His eleventh movie – and seventh with producer Robert Lantos – explores familiar thematic territory for the Oscar-nominated auteur, exploring intimacy and the nature of our relationship to media.

Atom Egoyan and Robert Lantos are re-teaming for Adoration, the Oscar-nominated director’s 11th feature film and his seventh collaboration with the head of Serendipity Point Films

What’s the magic formula that feeds and nurtures the Quebec feature film industry to hit after hit – and has for the past decade? The latest example of its seemingly inexhaustible surge came the Canada Day weekend, when Alain DesRochers’ thriller Nitro opened to $1.2 million on 124 screens in its home province.

At first glance it may seem that the success of Apple’s Final Cut Pro nonlinear editing software has prompted a return of Adobe’s own Premiere application to the Mac platform, after more than a six-year absence.

There’s no bigger cheerleader for Canadian production than Norman Jewison. He was reading through his morning newspaper recently, he told me, when an item caught his attention. It was an article about how Rhombus Media producer Niv Fichman crisscrossed the globe in order to secure the movie rights to Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, which goes to camera in Ontario in late July with an eye to a spring 2008 release.

Norman Jewison’s downtown office overlooks a City of Toronto park that bears his name. The master filmmaker’s single request to the city was to include a dog fountain – named after longtime family pet Barney – with a trigger pedal so that canines could release cool water with a press of their paw.