The Canadian Screen Awards has unveiled nominations for the national film and TV prize-giving, and the CBC civil rights drama The Porter leads the film and TV field with 19 mentions in all, including for best small-screen drama.

The first Canadian drama series from an all-Black creative team, which also streams on BET+, centers on the lives of Black train porters and their families as they launch North America’s first Black labor union in the 1920s.

The TV categories, voted on by around 3,000 Canadian industry insiders, also sees the CBC series Detention Adventure and Sort Of – a Peabody award-winning show about a gender fluid young Muslim in Toronto played by Bilal Baig — nab 15 nominations each in an awards show shaping up to be a major showcase for people of color.

That follows Canadian film, and TV industry efforts to ensure diversity and inclusivity in the country’s indie production sector and prize-giving process.

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The Fantasia Film Festival is set to close with July Jung’s thriller Next Sohee, organizers said on Thursday.

Korean filmmaker Jung’s drama, which debuted by closing the Cannes Critics’ Week and will get a North American bow in Montreal, follows a young woman driven to suicide by a relentless work environment and an outraged investigator trying to get to the bottom of what happened.

Fantasia on closing night will also host a special screening for Halina Reijn’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, which stars Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Rachel Sennott and Pete Davidson.

Unveiling its third wave of titles, the genre fest will also hold world premieres for Yuki Tanada’s My Broken Mariko and Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez’s The Elderly.

There’s also North American debuts for Quebec auteur Denis Côté’s That Kind of Summer...

FireFollowing a successful but necessarily impersonal virtual edition in 2021, the Berlin International Film Festival returned to in-person activities this year, drawing skepticism in some quarters but ultimately quieting the naysayers with a safe and efficient event that put the movies back where they belong: on the big screen. With mandatory daily Covid tests, 2G plus vaccination protocols, ticket reservations, assigned seating, and half-capacity venues, the Berlinale’s typically convivial vibe was sterilized and regimented in a way that’s already become familiar in an era of masks and social distancing. But no matter: the program, overseen by Carlo Chatrian in his third year as artistic director, while never quite reaching the skyscraping heights of recent editions (in which films like Days and What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? confirmed the new regime’s dedication to auteur-driven art cinema), provided a deep and rewarding wellspring of work...

Denis Côté is a weird kind of humanist, arriving at that angle from an offbeat starting point. Maybe the key to his work thus far is his short, powerful 2012 documentary Bestiaire, surveying a bevy of exotic animals in a Quebec safari park, all pulled from their natural habitats. Beyond its prescient aspect, foreshadowing other recent animal-focused docs like Gunda and Cow, Côté enacts the role of a skewed portrait artist, showing the zebras, giraffes, and ostriches resplendent in their odd physicality, where you can feel them both attempting to evolve into, as well as neutralized by, their new environment of iron bars, railings, and peepholes.

A Skin So Soft, showing male bodybuilders in a similar state of haunted repose (and reviewed perceptively by Tfs’s Rory O’Connor on its 2017 premiere), is a byway from there towards his latest film, That Kind of Summer. This look at sex addiction could again...

“You are not here for a cure,” the founder of a 26-day sexual therapy retreat tells the small group of women enrolled in her program at the outset of “That Kind of Summer.” Laying out the ground rules for the sensitive self-awareness exercise that follows — a loosely structured hiatus from unhealthy temptations, designed for those whose out-of-control impulses have made their lives unmanageable — she reassures, “You are not forbidden any sexual thoughts or behavior here. You are not sick.”

Shot on grainy Super 16 with the kind of unsteady handheld aesthetic that suggests the cameraperson really ought to get their inner ear checked, Denis Côté’s radically nonjudgmental “let’s talk about sex” drama looks and feels like a documentary — at least, it could pass as one until a giant CG tarantula crawls up the wall while one of the women is masturbating late in the game. By then, it’s safe to say,...

An isolated house in the country, a small tribe of peculiar characters mostly keeping a wary distance from each other: That Kind of Summer (Un Ete Comme Ca) is a film set up perfectly for the pandemic era. The bonus zinger is that the house is a live-in retreat for supposedly, or maybe just possibly, recovering sex addicts. Nobody leaves, and everyone talks dirty. Denis Cote, the prolific Quebecois provocateur, must have been hugging himself when he thought of that one.

Cote’s previous feature, made during Canada’s strictest lockdown, was wittily titled Social Hygiene. It was filmed on a hillside, where a succession of different women hurled abuse at a man who had offended all of them; he looked and sounded as if he had just wandered on set from a Dostoevsky novel. By comparison, That Kind of Summer is quite conventional. At least we know the sex addiction program lasts just 26 days,...

French-Canadian returns to Competition after last year’s Encounters prize.

France’s Shellac has boarded worldwide sales on French-Canadian director Denis Côté’s Berlin-bound That Kind Of Summer in the run-up to next month’s festival and market.

Larissa Corriveau, who starred in Côté’s 2019 Golden Bear nominee Ghost Town Anthology, Laure Giappiconi and Aude Mathieu play the leads in Montreal-based Metafilms’ French-language Competition entry about three women invited to a rest home to explore their sexual issues.

As they co-exist under the detached supervision of a German therapist and a considerate social worker, the group attempts to maintain a...