Offscreen (Canada)

George Mihalka, Michael Ironside, and Marc Lamothe on stage (Photo, Donato Totaro) George Mihalka has an impressive and important pedigree in the landscape of Canadian and Quebec cinema. The Hungarian-born Canadian director made his feature debut in 1980 with the teen comedy Pinball Summer, which was also screened at Fantasia, as part of his 2025 “Canadian Trailblazer Award” (actress Sheila McCarthy was also a recipient of this award).

Lucid, 2025 (Photo, Fantasia International Film Festival) Anything That Moves (2025, Alex Philips) is an apt demonstration that the desire, or return to shooting on film in the digital era is not only a choice of the elite (Nolan, Tarantino, Spielberg, Scorsese, etc.) but the young and adventurous, working with less resources and institutional or industry support.

Ballerina [Photo, Lionsgate] In Canadian animation history, it is hard to overstate the NFB’s contributions, particularly the films by Norman McLaren, Ryan Larkin, Jacques Drouin, Carolyn Leaf, Co Hoederman, Cordell Barker, Wendy Tilby, and more recently, Abenaki author and artist Diane Obomsawin, among many others (Solomon).

Setrag Manoukian at the Podium (Photo, Donato Totaro) This March 2026 marks the 5th anniversary of the passing of Canadian-Iranian filmmaker/artist Shahin Parhami. His legacy was covered in this journal in a special November-December 2021 issue dedicated to his memory.

They Called Us “les Filles du Roy”(Photo, NFB) In Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen challenge the traditional cinematic language and the dominance of the male gaze by refusing to control or penetrate the space in ways typical of classical cinema. The camera's slow, meditative 360 degree circular pans represent the antithesis of the cinematic pleasure seen in the dominant cinematic styles of the time.

Eye on Juliet (2017, Kim Nguyen, Canada) [Photo, Item 7] Film director Kim Nguyen, born in Montreal of a Vietnamese father and French Canadian mother, graduated from Concordia University in 1997 with a BFA in Film Production. Kim Nguyen’s first feature was the 2002 fantasy comedy Le marais. Nguyen’s breakthrough film was the 2012 political war drama, Rebelle (War Witch), which received an Oscar Nomination for Best Foreign film.

Oublie pas le gruau (Olivier Godin, 2026) [Photo, La Distributrice de Films] Day 2 On the second day of the Semaine de la critique de Montreal I saw Revelations of Divine Love (Caroline Golum, 2025) and Don’t Forget the Oatmeal (Oublie pas le gruau) by Olivier Godin (2025). Golum’s film is an interesting if not entirely successful dramatization of a 14th century anchoress Julian of Norwich, “a mystic nun known as the first Female writer in the English language” (from the catalogue notes).

The Blair Witch Project (Photo, Lionsgate) In horror cinema, fear is rarely confined to what appears on screen. More often, it emerges from a tension between presence and absence, between what is shown and what is withheld, between the visible body and the inaudible or unseen threat that exceeds it.

F for Fake (Photo, Criterion Pictures) Introduction In the documentary Filming Othello (1978), which offers a revealing look into his film Othello (1951), Orson Welles shares insights on the myriad challenges encountered during its production: “We were never able to afford to build anything, so nothing was designed, everything had to be found, hence all that globe-trotting.

Leave Her To Heaven (Photo source, Criterion Films) Introduction John M. Stahl is one of those directors born to the American public in the golden age of Hollywood who remains unjustly forgotten. Authors such as Román Gubern barely give him a couple of credits in his reviews of the history of film art, in this case dismissing him as a "sure craftsman" (Gubern, 2006: 244), and other historians and theorists, such as Jean Mitry, do not even contemplate his mere existence.