Queer director Fawzia Mirza was well into her twenties before she went to her first gay bar. Born into a Muslim family in London, Ont. and raised in Sydney, NS, the Pakistani-Canadian wasn’t ready to come out as lesbian—“so instead, when I met a woman, I’d tell her that I was 50% gay,” she says in her 2012 short film, The Queen of My Dreams. It was that tension—held in thrall by the Bollywood heroines she grew up watching, and caught wrestling between her identities as both queer and Muslim—that fuelled her first short film, and would eventually spawn a feature-length adaptation. Mirza’s full-length directorial debut has been picking up buzz: Not only does it open Halifax’s 2023 Atlantic International Film Festival on Thursday, Sept. 14; it also premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has earned glowing reviews from Variety and the Los Angeles Times.
In TQOMD, Mirza takes her audience into the lives of two generations of women: A “queer daughter struggling to find her place” in Cape Breton in the 1990s, and her mother, growing up in 1960s-era Pakistan. With lead performances from Amrit Kaur (The Sex Lives of College Girls), Hamza Haq (Transplant) and Nimra Bucha (Ms. Marvel), the film explores the mother and daughter’s “overlapping aspirations and the hurdles they must overcome to reach them.”
The film headlines a talent-packed roster of offerings at #AIFF23, from documentaries to award-winning book adaptations to homegrown talent. Allow us to be your festival guide.
What else is buzzworthy at AIFF this year?
Vancouver actor-director Meredith Hama-Browne’s full-length feature debut, Seagrass, follows Judith, a Japanese-Canadian grappling with the death of her mother and the faultlines within her interracial marriage. Hama-Browne was recently named to The Kit’s 2023 Power List of Canadian Women in Film. This week, she was also longlisted—along with Mirza—for the Directors Guild of Canada’s “Jean-Marc Vallée DGC Discovery Award,” which highlights up-and-coming talent. (Bretten Hannam was shortlisted for Wildhood in 2021, and Anthony Shim won for Riceboy Sleeps in 2022.)
Halifax’s Elliot Page produces and stars in Close to You, a Canadian indie drama that follows trans man Sam, back home in small-town Cobourg, Ont. for the first time since his transition and after four years of living in Toronto. The film explores the nerves and emotions of “coming home as yourself, only for everyone to treat you like a completely different person.” It also marks the 36-year-old Page’s first scripted feature film appearance in six years—a film that opens with what Entertainment Weekly describes as a “quietly powerful scene” in which Sam awakes shirtless, before peering out his window and putting on his clothes to make a cup of tea.
Speaking with EW, Page describes the moment—and the film—as a “liberating” experience and a career highlight: “Showing this dude who’s comfortable and present and waking up in his body, that means a lot to me. I never thought I’d feel that way, so it’s nice to get to act it.”
St. John’s, NL-based director and screenwriter Christian Sparkes premieres his latest drama, Sweetland, at this year’s festival. The film adaptation of author Michael Crummey’s novel follows Moses (played by Mark Lewis Jones), a retired fisherman facing resettlement from his home on a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland. The government is offering money for all the island’s residents to leave. Moses doesn’t want to. The Hour Has 22 Minutes’ Mary Walsh makes a cameo in the film, along with Sara Canning (The Vampire Diaries) and Lawrence Barry (Riverhead, Republic of Doyle). Sparkes’ feature-length debut, Cast No Shadow, took home a haul of awards at AIFF in 2014, including “Best Atlantic Feature,” “Best Director,” “Best Screenplay,” “Best Actress,” “Best Actor” and “Best Cinematography.”
What other local talent is there to see?
Dartmouth documentarian Megan Wennberg’s Unsyncable makes an AIFF appearance, fresh off its Hot Docs world premiere. The film follows six senior artistic swimmers—ages 63 to 82—prepping for the US Masters Artistic Swimming Championships.
“By jumping in the pool and pushing their limits every practice, Sue, Ellen, Cris, Monica, Luther and Joyce kick back against the expectation that getting older means slowing down and succumbing to our limitations,” Wennberg says. “I hope they will inspire audiences to see aging in a new light—not as something to dread, but as something to aspire to as we all ‘rage against the dying of the light’ in our own unique ways.”
The restored print of William D. MacGillivray’s 1987 film Life Classes, set in Halifax and Cape Breton, gets a screening at AIFF—along with a Q&A with MacGillivray after the Saturday, Sept. 16 showing.
The PEI crime-comedy caper Who’s Yer Father? stars comedian Chris Locke (Mr. D, TallBoyz) as a down-and-out private investigator who’s hired to look into a series of “suspicious black-market lobster sales in Sandbar Cove.”
AIFF honours the late Gordon Pinsent with a pair of free re-screenings: The first of 1987’s John and the Missus, a film about a town reeling from its local mine’s closure, and one man who refuses the government’s settlement offer; and the latter of 2013’s The Grand Seduction, a story of a small Newfoundland fishing village that needs to recruit a new doctor.
Where to get tickets
Show passes are available on AIFF’s website as ticket bundles or festival passes, with discounts for both students and seniors. The festival runs from Thursday, Sept. 14 to Thursday, Sept. 21. Find a full festival schedule here.
This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2023.