Offscreen (Canada)

The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) organized the 45th Istanbul Film Festival from April 9-19, 2026, with N Kolay returning as the event’s sponsor for the third consecutive year. During this edition of the festival, the prestigious Golden Tulip award was presented to Swiss-Kenyan filmmakerDamien Hauser for his film, Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025).

I am very fortunate in that I have been able to attend all ten editions of the Nitrate Picture Show (NPS), at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York State. This year’s edition (June 4–7, 2026) was the best of them all, with only a couple of prints not being pristine. Some of the films I had never seen before and others that I had seen, I had never viewed on cellulose nitrate prints, while I had seen a few in 35mm and 16mm film prints, on a big screen.

Photo source, Donato Totaro Resurrection (2025, Be Gan, China-France) Photo Source, Festival du nouveau cinéma Bi Gan’s ambitious SF arthouse epic is a loving pean to cinema, if not cinema history, and perhaps something more although after only one screening it is hard to say what that ‘something more’ may be. Shu Qi, who I first saw light the screen in Hou Hsaio-sein’s Millennium Mambo, appears again in a story that holds the millennium change in high priority, as a sort of narrating presence.

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).