Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

Films from the  27th edition Fantasia  International Film Festival  July/August 2023 List of Asian movies in this list : https://mydramalist.com/list/LQJb0B83

Fantasia International Film Festival Compilation 2023

The first 40 films are ranked in order of preference; the rest are in chronological order.

Canada still doesn't get much respect - even sometimes from it's own citizens - when it comes to film.  Utterly dominated in the market by the USA, Canadian films struggle to get distributed even within their own borders, let alone outside of the country.  Many Canadian filmmakers - including some very fine ones like David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan - have, not surprisingly, sought funding and work in the USA or elsewhere (usually the UK or France), but one of the things that makes Canadian cinema so appealing to me is that there are still a great many Canuck filmmakers who steadfastly continue to make "Canadian" films, at whatever budgets they can afford, for what small audiences show up.

And what is a "Canadian" film?  Canada has a long and rich enough film history, and it's no more useful to stereotype the whole industry than it is to stereotype Hollywood; maybe less so as there are two distinct industries or film cultures, those of Québec and of the English-speaking majority of the country.  And often these industries have followed the lead of those of France or the USA and UK; lots of low-budget "kitchen sink" dramas in the 60s, lots of French New Wave inspired work in Québec and lots of cheap horror and exploitation in both French and English-speaking areas, etc.  To my mind this is too often a losing game; Canada has been at it's best when going it's own route - the experimental work of McLaren, Snow and Chambers, the weirdness and personal obsessions of Cronenberg, Maddin and Egoyan, the focus on Québec culture of Jutra, Carle and Brault, the difficulties of being gay or different in bland Montréal suburbia in Xavier Dolan's work, Sarah Polley's focusing on aging and female sexuality, etc.  The National Film Board of Canada must be mentioned also, one of the world's greatest national film producing organizations and one of the reasons why in the realm of experimental animation and short films, Canada can stand with any country.  And much more that I'm forgetting, or that I haven't explored yet myself.

All that said, it would be hyperbole to rank Canadian cinema among the greatest or most influential in the world, but for a country of 30 million that often seems to get treated, and sometimes treats itself, as a poor brother to it's powerhouse neighbor to the south, I think it's done OK for itself, and I would in fact argue that in the last 30 years it has become one of the world's stronger cinema cultures with great work being produced in Toronto, Montréal and of course Winnipeg.

It's not just maple syrup and hockey!

Crate-Digger Film Canon: All Films of the 60s

Fritz Lang, Dawn Addams, and Peter van Eyck in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)

no description available for "Big Bird & Friends" on Sesame Street

Elmo's movie list (before Maria strictly bosses around Elmo)

Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, and Ryan Dillon in Sesame Street (1969)

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