Heather Young is a Canadian filmmaker based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
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.
Kathleen Hepburn is a Canadian screenwriter and film director. She first attracted acclaim for her film Never Steady, Never Still, which premiered as a short film in 2015 before being expanded into her feature film debut in 2017. The film received eight Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Hepburn.
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.
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. The list was first introduced in 2001 as an initiative to help publicize Canadian films.
Jasmin Mozaffari is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. She won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Director at the 7th Canadian Screen Awards in 2019 for her debut feature film Firecrackers.
Ariane Louis-Seize is a Canadian film director and screenwriter from Quebec.
Akilla's Escape is a 2020 drama film, directed by Charles Officer, his final feature prior to his death in 2023. The film stars Saul Williams as Akilla, a marijuana dealer retiring from the business following legalization, who tries to rescue a young boy from being drawn into a life of crime.
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.
Scarborough is a 2021 Canadian drama film, directed by Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson. An adaptation of Catherine Hernandez's 2017 novel Scarborough, the film centres on the coming of age of Bing, Sylvie and Laura, three young children in a low-income neighbourhood in the Scarborough district of Toronto, as they learn the value of community, passion and resilience over the course of a school year through an after-school program led by childhood educator Ms. Hina.
Mariner is a Canadian short drama film, directed by Thyrone Tommy and released in 2016. The film stars Thomas Antony Olajide as Nate, a Black Canadian student at a naval academy who begins to suffer anxiety attacks as he prepares for his final marine navigation exam.
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.
Thomas Antony Olajide, sometimes also credited as Thomas Olajide, is a Canadian actor and writer from Vancouver, British Columbia. He is most noted for his performance in the 2021 film Learn to Swim, for which he received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Actor at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards in 2022, and as co-creator with Tawiah M'carthy and Stephen Jackman-Torkoff of Black Boys, a theatrical show about Black Canadian LGBTQ+ identities which was staged by Buddies in Bad Times in 2016. Olajide, M'carthy, and Jackman-Torkoff were collectively nominated for Outstanding Ensemble Performance at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 2017.
Ste. Anne is a Canadian experimental drama film, directed by Rhayne Vermette and released in 2021. The film stars Vermette as Renée, a Métis woman returning to her hometown in Manitoba for the first time in four years to reconnect with her family.
Rosie is a 2022 Canadian comedy-drama film, written, produced, and directed by Gail Maurice. Maurice's feature directorial debut and an expansion of her 2018 short film of the same name, the film centres on Rosie, a young First Nations girl who is sent to live with her aunt Frédérique in Montreal after her mother's death, and learns the value of rebuilding chosen family from Fred and her two-spirit friends Flo and Mo.
Miryam Charles is a Haitian-Canadian filmmaker from Montreal, Quebec, whose debut feature film This House was released in 2022.
Seagrass is a 2023 Canadian drama film, written and directed by Meredith Hama-Brown. Hama-Brown's full-length feature debut, the film stars Ally Maki as Judith, a woman who is at a family retreat with her husband Steve and their children following the death of her mother, where she and Steve are coping with tensions in their marriage arising from their status as an interracial couple.
The Queen of My Dreams is a 2023 Canadian comedy-drama film, written and directed by Fawzia Mirza. Mirza's full-length directorial debut, the film stars Amrit Kaur as Azra, a Pakistani Canadian woman who has had a strained relationship with her parents since coming out as lesbian, who undergoes an emotional journey after the sudden unexpected death of her father Hassan.
Samuel Matteau is a Canadian film director from Quebec. He is most noted as co-director with Guillaume Fournier and Yannick Nolin of a trilogy of short documentary films about Cajun life and culture in Louisiana.
Yannick Nolin is a Canadian film director and cinematographer from Quebec. He is most noted as co-director with Guillaume Fournier and Samuel Matteau of a trilogy of short documentary films about Cajun life and culture in Louisiana.
