Canada's Top Ten is an annual honour, compiled by the Toronto International Film Festival and announced in December each year to identify and promote the year's best Canadian films. [1] The list was first introduced in 2001 as an initiative to help publicize Canadian films. [1]
The list is determined by tabulating votes from film festival programmers and film critics across Canada. [2] Films must have premiered, either in general theatrical release or on the film festival circuit, within the calendar year; although TIFF organizes the vote, films do not have to have been screened specifically at TIFF to be eligible.
Originally, only a single list of 10 films was released. Although both short and feature films were eligible, the list was dominated primarily by feature films. Accordingly, in 2007 TIFF expanded the program, instituting separate Top Ten lists for feature films and short films. [3] However, both lists remain inclusive of both narrative fiction and documentary films.
Each year's list was formerly screened as a Canada's Top Ten minifestival, held in January of the following year. [4] Prior to 2010, the films were screened at the Art Gallery of Ontario's Jackman Theatre as part of TIFF's Cinematheque Ontario program; [5] following the opening of the TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2010, the festival was staged at that venue thereafter. For the 2014 festival, TIFF introduced a People's Choice Award for the feature film program, modeled on the existing Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award and conducted in the same manner. [6]
In 2018, TIFF dropped the January festival, instead introducing a new model in which each film receives its own standalone theatrical run at the Lightbox in the following year. [7] In 2024, following the death of influential Canadian film director Charles Officer in fall 2023, TIFF and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also introduced the Charles Officer Award, to be presented at the Canada's Top Ten reception to a filmmaker whose body of work is reflective of Officer's values, artistry and vision. [8]
Once per decade, TIFF also polls Canadian film critics and festival programmers to determine a list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time, separately from the annual Canada's Top Ten survey.
In a 2022 article, Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail praised the program as a diverse overview of the creative risk-taking in Canadian cinema, and a worthwhile contrast to the limited scope of conventional commercial film distribution. [9]
Films which won the People's Choice Award are bolded and marked with a †.
The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the most prestigious and largest publicly attended film festivals in the world, founded in 1976 and taking place each September. It is also a permanent destination for film culture operating out of the TIFF Lightbox cultural centre, located in Downtown Toronto.
Charles Officer was a Canadian film and television director, writer, actor, and professional hockey player.
Heather Young is a Canadian filmmaker based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Werewolf is a 2016 Canadian drama film directed by Ashley McKenzie and starring Andrew Gillis and Bhreagh MacNeil. It marks McKenzie's feature film directorial debut. The film premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, and subsequently received numerous accolades, including several Canadian Screen Award nominations, and the $100,000 Toronto Film Critics Association prize for best Canadian film of the year in 2017.
Kazik Radwanski is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. His early short films have been cited as part of the New Canadian Cinema movement. He made his feature film directorial debut in 2012 with Tower. His second feature film, How Heavy This Hammer (2015), screened at film festivals around the world and received critical acclaim.
Ava is a 2017 internationally co-produced drama film directed and written by Sadaf Foroughi. The Persian-language film screened for the first time in the Discovery section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Discovery Prize and received an Honourable Mention for Best Canadian First Feature Film.
Firecrackers is a 2018 Canadian drama film written and directed by Jasmin Mozaffari. An expansion of Mozaffari's 2013 short film of the same name, the film stars Michaela Kurimsky and Karena Evans as two teenage girls trying to escape their small town.
The Platform Prize is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to films of "high artistic merit that also demonstrate a strong directorial vision." Introduced in 2015, the award is presented to a film, selected by an international jury of three prominent filmmakers or actors, from among the films screened in the Platform program. The program normally screens between eight and twelve films; only one winner is selected each year, although as with TIFF's other juried awards the jurors have the discretion to give honorable mentions to other films besides the overall winner.
Herd Leader is a Canadian short drama film, directed by Chloé Robichaud and released in 2012. The film stars Ève Duranceau as Clara, a shy woman who must build confidence in herself when she inherits her late aunt's dog and has to learn how to train it.
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk is a Canadian drama film, directed by Zacharias Kunuk and released in 2019. The film dramatizes the true story of Noah Piugattuk, an Inuk hunter, over the day in 1961 when he was fatefully approached by a Canadian government agent who encouraged him to give up the traditional Inuit lifestyle and assimilate into a conventionally modern settlement.
Antigone is a 2019 Canadian drama film directed by Sophie Deraspe. An adaptation of the ancient Greek play Antigone by Sophocles, the film transposes the story to a modern-day refugee family in Montreal. The cast includes Nahéma Ricci as Antigone, with Rawad El-Zein, Hakim Brahimi, Rachida Oussaada, and Nour Belkhiria. It was filmed in Greater Montreal in 2018.
Anne at 13,000 Ft. is a 2019 Canadian drama film. Directed and written by Kazik Radwanski, the film stars Deragh Campbell as Anne, a shy, socially awkward daycare worker whose attitude to her life and work is radically transformed after she skydives for the first time. It premiered in the Platform Prize program at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, and received an honourable mention from the Platform Prize jury. In December 2019, the film was named to TIFF's annual year-end Canada's Top Ten list. After premiering on the festival circuit in 2019, the film's 2020 theatrical release was postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Black Conflux is a 2019 Canadian drama film written and directed by Nicole Dorsey in her feature directorial debut. Starring Ella Ballentine, Ryan McDonald, Luke Bilyk, Olivia Scriven, Sofia Banzhaf, and Lawrence Barry, the film follows a teenage girl from Newfoundland and Labrador whose quest for independence leads her into the orbit of a mentally unstable and potentially violent man in his twenties.
The 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, the 45th event in the Toronto International Film Festival series, was held from September 10 to 21, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, the festival took place primarily on an online streaming platform, although limited in-person screenings still took place within the constraints of social distancing restrictions.
The 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, the 46th event in the Toronto International Film Festival series, was held from September 9 to 18, 2021. Due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic in Toronto, the festival was staged as a "hybrid" of in-person and digital screenings. Most films were screened both in-person and on the digital platform, although a few titles were withheld by their distributors from the digital platform and instead were screened exclusively in-person.
Thyrone Tommy is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. After writing and directing the short film Mariner (2016), Tommy received acclaim for his work on the feature film Learn to Swim (2021), both of which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Learn to Swim is a Canadian drama film written by Thyrone Tommy and Marni Van Dyk and directed by Tommy in his feature-length directorial debut. The film centres on a stormy romantic relationship between Dezi and Selma, two talented but troubled jazz musicians.
Share Her Journey is a Canadian film program, created by the Toronto International Film Festival to foster the career development and advancement of women in the film industry.
The 47th annual Toronto International Film Festival was held from September 8 to 18, 2022.