The Toronto International Film Festival’s annual Canada’s Top Ten list is out. Once again, documentaries are sorely underrepresented. This year’s list of Canada’s ten best features includes just one documentary: Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. The documentary by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, produced by Banger Films and the National Film Board of Canada, absolutely deserves a spot on this list. It’s an excellent portrait of late soul singer Jackie Shane, who broke ground as an out and Black trans singer on the Toronto scene in the 1960s’ before disappearing in the early ’70s. But it shouldn’t be the only title representing an entire field of Canadian film. Again.
TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten consistently struggles to spotlight great documentary features. I don’t think it’s necessarily useful or productive to focus on what gets left off a list rather than what’s included—as a voter in several critics’ groups, the line-by-line audits of lists and audits can be very frustrating—but consistent oversights can’t be ignored. I feel like I’ve written this article several times in the past few years. Including documentaries shouldn’t be a tokenist gesture.
To be fair, this year’s list also includes two short documentaries: Alison McAlpine’s delightfully kooky alpaca odyssey perfectly a strangeness and Arshia Shakiba’s excellent and beautifully shot Who Loves the Sun. They’re slam dunk choices, but, again, in the minority.
Last year’s Canada’s Top Ten list included only one feature documentary as well: Zack Russell’s housing crisis doc Someone Lives Here. Chelsea McMullan’s Swan Song didn’t make the cut even though it scored a Gala at TIFF and won the Toronto Film Critics Association’s inaugural Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award.
That lone 2023 doc slot was a step down from the whopping three documentaries in 2022: Black Ice, To Kill a Tiger, and This House. 2021, however, had one doc, Subjects of Desire, while 2020 had two with Inconvenient Indian (awkward!) and Judy Versus Capitalism (inspired!). 2019 had none.
Making lists is never easy, but the spotlight of Canada’s Top Ten consistently blows off some of the widely acclaimed and most widely screened Canadian films from the festival circuit, presumably just because they’re documentaries and therefore “lesser” options. Three, while still a minority, at least offers a respectable presence and doesn’t burden one film with representing an entire field.
2024 admittedly had a smaller pool of documentaries to choose from if one focused on commercial releases, but the presence for docs on the festival circuit didn’t really change. Admittedly, multi-part doc The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal probably got the most play in the fall, but wouldn’t have been eligible as an episodic work, while some of the docs directed by Canadians, like Union and Sugarcane, wouldn’t have been eligible here because they’re technically American docs due to financing.
The most glaring omission from the list, for starters, is the excellent Yintah, a rallying cry for Indigenous rights and land sovereignty. The doc by Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickham, and Brenda Michell should really be on this list for its portrait of land defenders. Sure, it’s way too long, but so is the ongoing fight on Wetsuwet’en territory that it chronicles.
Besides bringing a compelling Indigenous story, Yintah’s also among the most acclaimed Canadian films of 2024. Its wins include both the Rogers Audience Award for Canadian Film at Hot Docs and the festival’s overall Audience Award, and it received a special mention in Hot Docs’ inaugural spotlight for environmental films. It received two special mentions at DOXA, and screened at international fests like True/False and IDFA. Like Any Other Way, it’s one of three current nominees for the TFCA’s Rogers Best Canadian Documentary Award.
Yintah is now on Netflix, so maybe that’s a factor, but Any Other Way is on Crave and fellow CTT selection Rumours (totally worthy of the spotlight) is on Prime Video, while others like Seeds are on VOD.
Fellow TFCA nominee Your Tomorrow, directed by Ali Weinstein, could have easily have snagged a spot on the list for its portrait of Ontario Place and the importance of accessible public spaces in Canadian cities. TIFF could have made things really fun, too, by bringing the first father-daughter combo to Canada’s Top Ten by spotlighting Larry Weinstein’s Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity. It’s one of the prolific director’s first films—and, by my count, one of few Canadian docs to tackle the ongoing Israel/Palestine situation so far. And it does so in a personal and nuanced way.
Other great Canadian docs of 2024 include Pablo Álvarez-Mesa’s The Soldier’s Lagoon, which won Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs and Best Canadian Director at DOXA – top Canadian honours at both spring festivals. The experimental film would have echoed the inspired selection of This House two years ago.
Meanwhile, Kim O’Bomsawin’s Ninan Auassat: We, the Children won Best Canadian Documentary at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Magnus Isaacson Award at RIDM for its moving portrait of Indigenous youths. But perhaps two NFB films were too many—or two films that didn’t play TIFF 2024, as Any Other Way represents the only feature on the list that premiered at another Canadian festival.
Issues of festival strategy could have come into play for worthy Canadian docs like Wilfred Buck, Plastic People, The Movie Man, Adrianne & the Castle, Intercepted, The Death Tour, and 7 Beats Per Minute—all great Canadian docs that played elsewhere but presumably could have found appreciation in the national spotlight. Moreover, these films all would have furthered a diverse slate of representation in addition to providing films with significant artistic merit that hit Canadian screens. In many cases, they have probably had an easier time being embraced outside Canada, too. I don’t really blame TIFF for omitting their own selection Russians at War, mind you, but that would have been a bold move.
It’s worth noting, too, that TIFF’s list is made in consultation with programmers from festivals across the country, but few in the feature category aside from Windsor and Calgary Underground that screen a healthy slate of docs. Hot Docs, RIDM, and VIFF are all absent among the feature consultants.
I’m not trying to take away from the films that are on the list. There are some truly great selections, like Canada’s Oscar contender Universal Language by Matthew Rankin and Sophie Derapse’s luminous Shepherds. It’s just that the short-changing of documentaries is an ongoing concern.
Celebrating the artistic and cultural value of documentaries is especially important in 2025. Heading into an election year, Canada’s surely facing a Conservative government and one that’s already vowed to dismantle the CBC among its first points of business. The impact for feature films is concerning, but doubly so for documentaries. Canada’s public broadcaster, imperfect as it is, offers a lifeline for documentary. Now isn’t the time to treat documentary as an afterthought, but rather to celebrate it as a vital form of Canadian cultural expression.
The (mostly dramatic) films in Canada’s Top Ten are:
Canada’s Top Ten Features
40 Acres | dir. R.T. Thorne | 113 minutes | English and Cree
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story | dirs. Michael Mabbott, Lucah Rosenberg-Lee | 98 minutes | English
Can I Get a Witness? | dir. Ann Marie Fleming | 110 minutes | English
Matt and Mara | dir. Kazik Radwanski | 80 minutes | English
Paying For It | dir. Sook-Yin Lee | 85 minutes | English
Rumours | dirs. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson | 103 minutes | English, French, Swedish, and German
Seeds | dir. Kaniehtiio Horn | 82 minutes | English and Kanien’kéha
Shepherds (Bergers) | dir. Sophie Deraspe |113 minutes | French
The Shrouds | dir. David Cronenberg | 119 minutes | English
Universal Language (Une langue universelle) | dir. Matthew Rankin | 89 minutes | Farsi and French
Canada’s Top Ten Short Films
Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail? | dir. Bec Pecaut | 17 minutes | English
EarthWorm | dir. Phillip Barker | 16 minutes | English
Inkwo for When the Starving Return | dir. Amanda Strong | 18 minutes | English and Tlicho
Julian and the Wind | dir. Connor Jessup | 15 minutes | English
Maybe Elephants | dir. Torill Kove | 17 minutes | English
Mercenaire | dir. Pier-Philippe Chevigny | 15 minutes | French
On a Sunday at Eleven | dir. Alicia K. Harris | 9 minutes | English
One Day This Kid | dir. Alexander Farah | 18 minutes | Dari/Farsi and English
perfectly a strangeness | dir. Alison McAlpine | 15 minutes | No dialogue
Who Loves the Sun | dir. Arshia Shakiba | 20 minutes | Arabic
