Take One's The Beginnings of the Beginnings: Canada's Top 10 Fiction Feature Film Debuts Since 1968

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by Tom McSorley
Take One December 2003-March 2004 Issue

In thinking about a list of the Top 10 debut fiction features since 1968 from the perpetually troubled, utterly indomitable Canadian feature film industry, it is appropriate to borrow the title of Peter Harcourt's seminal article comparing Gille Groulx's Le Chat dans le sac and Don Owen's Nobody Waved Good-Bye, two remarkable first features that arrived four years earlier. In "1964: The Beginning of a Beginning," Harcourt identifies the cultural and political implications of the start, however accidental and clandestine it may have been (given both films were intended to be documentaries), of something vitally important to a still very young Canadian cinematic culture: the possibilities of creating relevant, recognizably Canadian fiction feature films.

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This particular Top 10 list, initiated by the Canadian Film Centre on the 10th anniversary of its Feature Film Project and, coincidentally, the 35th birthday of Telefilm Canada, focuses its attention on the best debut fiction features produced in this country since money first began to trickle out of the CFDC. Film Centre executive Wayne Clarkson realizes full well that Canadian feature film history did not begin with the CFDC, but, as he says, "it did begin to become more consistent in terms of actual production activity with respect to feature films."

Moreover, in any process of list-making, Clarkson emphasizes, there is that inevitable "combination of pleasing thoughts about what's included and the disappoint of what's not. For example, we should make special mention of three films in particular that came very close: Michel Brault's Entre la mer et l'eau douce (1968), Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden (1997) and Don McKellar's Last Night (1998), which I consider one of the best debut films ever.

My note: Atanarjuat isn't actually Kunuk's debut fiction feature, but it seems that was not well-known at the time. He'd made two shorter hour-long dramas a decade earlier. Or perhaps they were dismissed as "medium-length films", which they also did with Cronenberg, as mentioned in the article.