Author: Adam Cook

From Nine to Nine is a remarkable debut feature from Neil Bahadur, a no-budget piece of DIY cinema that challenges what a film is supposed to be. A man is killed outside of a library. A young man (Beau Cooper) is arrested for the crime. Broke, handcuffed and hungry, he wanders Vancouver. How do we navigate cities, the world, ourselves? With intense influences—Straub-Huillet, Pedro Costa, late Godard, and contemporary Isiah Medina as much as masters of the past like Griffith, Chaplin and Ford—Bahadur’s sensibility is one deeply informed by an understanding of the building blocks film form and its...

Over the course of ten years, Kazik Radwanski has established himself as a key figure of the independent filmmaking scene in Toronto. Paired with producer Dan Montgomery, he has built a production company, MDFF, which has become a stalwart part of the city’s film community. The two partners even host monthly film screenings with visiting directors. Made on shoestring budgets, Radwanski’s films are shot almost entirely in tight, in close-up. Over-usage of close-ups in contemporary cinema is all too common, but the approach to form here produces a strange effect. In shooting exclusively in close-up, Radwanski creates mystery and...

Colombian-Canadian filmmaker Lina Rodriguez’s sophomore feature This Time Tomorrow is a film of quiet beauty. Like her debut, Señoritas, it is a delicately observed look at human behavior refreshingly devoid of overly dramatic or obvious emotional beats, consisting instead of long studied takes of conversation and interaction. Interested in the negative space of our lives that make up most of our time, Rodriguez finds intrigue and insight in what may first seem like the mundane, and in doing so uncovers the humanity of her characters. The film’s protagonist is a 17-year-old girl named Adelaida (Laura Osma). It follows her...