National Canadian Film Day/Emerging Lens Film Festival 2022

This week two cinema events are coinciding, both starting on Wednesday, April 20th — one nationwide and one local.

National Canadian Film Day (NCFD) is the annual national event celebrating Canadian film. It features more than 1,000 events across the country where audiences can catch a Canadian film locally or through broadcast/streaming.

Go here for a list of what’s showing in Nova Scotia on Wednesday, including Wildhood, Blood Quantum, 8:37 Rebirth, and Beans.

(These are all quality pictures, but if you had to choose one for National Canadian Film Day I’d suggest Tracy Deer’s Beans. I think every Canadian should see the film. It should be required.)

Those latter two pictures — Juanita Peters 8:37 Rebirth and Beans — are also being presented as part of the Emerging Lens Film Festival, which runs through Saturday with a series of online, hybrid, and in-person screenings.

It’s the festival’s 12th year, sharing the experience and work of African Canadian and other cultural filmmakers, based here in Canada and around the world.

For the full list of screenings — including a whack of short films — visit the Emerging Lens site. Go here for the in-person list of film screenings, and here for the online.

And if you’re just planning to stay home to enjoy Canadian films on Wednesday, a day set aside for them — and, let’s face it, we could all do more to support our homegrown cinema even when we don’t leave the house — I can happily report Netflix has a number of Canadian (and Canadian international co-pro) films on the streaming service, including the following:

Maudie, Brooklyn, Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell, Enemy, The F Word, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, and Remember.

About the author

flawintheiris

Carsten Knox is a massive, cheese-eating nerd. In the day he works as a journalist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At night he stares out at the rain-slick streets, watches movies, and writes about what he's seeing.

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