The seventh edition of Canadian Front, MoMA’s annual survey of new Canadian cinema, includes the New York premieres of eight features made over the last 18 months. This year’s selection includes two comedies: from Montreal, Émile Gaudreault’s surprise hit Fathers and Guns, and from Toronto, Rob Stefaniuk’s supernatural musical Suck. Two narrative features by first-time women filmmakers—Sherry White’s Crackie and Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds’s *ONLY*—speak to the anxieties of adolescence, and two dramas from Quebec confront the idea of mortality from radically different perspectives: Bernard Émond’s The Legacy deals with grace, while Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique recounts a mass murder. The exhibition also features a pair of nonfiction films: Brigitte Berman’s Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel and Peter Mettler’s wordless landscape film Petropolis. Finally, in memory of the filmmaker Allan King, who died this year and who was the subject of a MoMA retrospective in 2007, we present Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), the director’s first dramatic feature.
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film, in association with Telefilm Canada.
Canadian Front, 2010 is presented with the support of the Canadian Consulate General in New York. Special thanks to Brigitte Hubmann, Project Manager, Telefilm Canada.