Director: Jeff Nichols
Language: English
Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is unraveling. A devoted family man living in an Ohio small town, he’s plagued by disturbing dreams and apocalyptic visions, increasingly unable to determine what’s real and what’s imaginary. Provoked by his own sense of impending disaster, he begins to bulk up the family’s backyard storm shelter, putting everything in his life in jeopardy. Director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) makes smart use of the flat, Midwestern landscape, and the happy ordinariness of Curtis’s family, to offset the black clouds moving in. Oscar nominee Shannon (Revolutionary Road) stars with Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life, The Help) in this powerful metaphor for the growing unease in American life.

Director: Philippe Falardeau
Language: French with English subtitles
Produced by the team that brought Incendies to the screen last year, this Quebecois film by director Philippe Falardeau is a funny, authentic story about what we say when we talk to each other about death. Algerian political refugee Bashir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) contacts a Montreal elementary school when he reads in the newspaper that one of their teachers has committed suicide at the school. Desperate for work, he offers to fill in in the classroom, and the overwhelmed principal agrees. The story focuses on Lazhar’s struggle with the often-absurd Quebec education system, and his connection with two of the students, former friends who have been deeply affected by their teacher’s death. Monsieur Lazhar is Canada’s Best Foreign Film entry for the 2011 Academy Awards.

Language: French with English subtitles
Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki returns with this politically-charged fairy tale. The life of self-taught intellectual and shoeshiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms) has an unexpected twist of fate when he discovers African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) who has just emerged from a cargo ship container in the industrial French port city of Le Havre. It’s a stylized character study that moves back and forth between deadpan dark humour and the comfortable, comic charms of classic cinema. Idrissa is absorbed into Marcel’s working-class community, pursued by a police detective, and Marcel must figure out how to get the boy across the channel to England, where the rest of his family has gone.

Language: German, Russian, Italian, French, Slovenian, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles
Wim Wenders’s Oscar-nominated documentary on German experimental choreographer Pina Bausch has been called revolutionary, an exploration of dance, theatre, and life. Artistic director of Berlin’s Tanztheatre Wuppertal, Bausch was a towering figure in contemporary dance, mixing a wildly inventive approach to staging with elaborate, often surreal sets, and eclectic music. Wenders’s film, which he had to rethink after Bausch unexpectedly died of cancer days before shooting began, is an immersive experience of intense creativity, and the deep connections between dancers and choreographer. “Every sequence showcases Bausch’s gift for stripping the human experience down to form,” says the Ottawa Citizen. “Movement and the concrete manifestations of emotion. The effect isn’t just jaw-dropping, it’s spiritually inspiring.

Directed by Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), The Tree of Life follows one man from boyhood, delving into intimate and cosmic questions. Growing up in Texas in the 1950s, Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) grows into a discontented man. He’s struggling to reconcile his complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt), questioning the existence of faith, and imagining the origin and meaning of life. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Based on true historical events, Oranges and Sunshine tells the story of Margaret Humphreys (Emily Watson), a British social worker who discovered the mass forced migration of 130,000 poor children to Australia in the mid-20th century. A secret that the British government kept hidden for years, it led Humphreys to uncover the truth, and reunite hundreds of children with their parents.

This is the true story of Maruge (Oliver Litondo), a former Mau Mau freedom fighter, now in his 80s, living in rural Kenya. Hearing that the Kenyan government has offered an opportunity for free primary school education to the country’s children, Maruge shows up at the local school, where he meets head teacher Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris). Against the opposition of parents, other teachers, and government officials, Maruge enters a classroom for the first time in his life.

From internationally acclaimed Australian film director Bruce Beresford comes the inspirational true story of a small boy’s extraordinary journey from poverty to international stardom. Mao’s Last Dancer captures the intoxicating effects of first love and celebrity, the pain of exile, and ultimately the triumph of individual endeavour over ideology. Filmed in China, the US, and Australia and with a brilliant performance from Chi Cao as Li Cunxin, Mao’s Last Dancer is an exhilarating exploration of what it means to be free.

To encounter a film of heart-wrenching tragedy, mythic proportions, and sweeping visual majesty is rare, but such are the riches of Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. After last year’s multiple Genie Award-winning Polytechnique, Villeneuve continues his acute examination of women in devastating situations facing complex and harrowing circumstances.

Another Year is a deeply absorbing look at a couple who seem to have gotten it right and a bunch of people who haven’t, and a son who could go either way! In this wry and affectionate character study of a mostly middle-aged group of people, director Mike Leigh’s grip on the material is unfailingly confident and his actors all deliver highly charged and beautifully shaded performances.  

Following on the heels of his brilliant 2003 hit, Les Triplettes de Belleville, director Sylvain Chomet returns to the Festival with The Illusionist, another beautifully drawn and poignant work of animation. Based on an unproduced script by Jacques Tati, the film follows forlorn and timeworn Tatischeff, a shabby but dignified magician trying to find an audience in a world of 50s rock and roll and consumerism.

In I Am Love, an aristocratic Italian family gathers to celebrate the birthday party of the family patriarch. However, the estate’s cool, cultivated ritual is disturbed by the visit of a young man who becomes a central character in the family drama. In a cast headed by Tilda Swinton, sexual and class politics play a key role as controlled moments of passion and emotion suddenly break the placid surface of the Recchi family.

Ree Dolly is a resourceful, resilient 17-year-old living with her broken-down family deep in the Ozark Mountains. When her meth-making father disappears, the family home is threatened, and in an epic quest that takes her from adolescence to adulthood, Ree crosses their bleak, impoverished county in search of him. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Winter’s Bone features a break-out performance by newcomer Jennifer Lawrence.

A newly retired criminal investigator is writing a novel about a real cold case from 1974 – the murder of a young woman in her own apartment. As he searches for new clues, he’s drawn into a tense game that pits past against present and colleagues against suspects. The Secret in Their Eyes, a sleek, suspenseful Argentinean film noir, won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.