Toronto on Film

By Geoff Pevere, Piers Handling, Matthew Hays, Wyndham Wise, Brenda Longfellow, Steve Gravestock, and Justin D. Edwards
224 Pages

No Canadian city has been exposed, cinematically speaking, more often than Toronto. Published to coincide with the city’s 175th birthday, Toronto on Film examines the way the city has been presented in cinema. Geoff Pevere examines Toronto’s portrayal by filmmakers such as David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan and in seminal works such as Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye and Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road. Just like the real city, the reel city of Toronto is a place of fascinating complexity, rich contradiction, and radical transformation, and Pevere presents an analysis of how filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta (Sam and Me; Bollywood Hollywood) and Srnivas Krishna (Masala) have created an alternative, more magical view of the city. Key landmarks such as the CN Tower and the Yonge Street strip are featured in some of the wilder and more recherché portraits of Toronto.

Toronto on Film includes a new essay by critic and scholar Matthew Hays, writing on the development of queer-themed film in Toronto, as well as contributions by Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival co-director and CEO; former Take One editor and publisher Wyndham Wise (on the emergence of the independent film scene in 1960s Toronto); filmmaker and scholar Brenda Longfellow (on the birth of the Toronto New Wave); and Steve Gravestock, associate director of Canadian programming at TIFF. The book contains an annotated filmography of key Toronto films.

Published by the Toronto International Film Festival.