TIFF 51: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney” and “Sunburn” were among the fest’s best Canadian films
Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 8:00PM ;)
Sometimes, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that TIFF is a Canadian film festival. It’s the biggest Canadian film festival, to be specific, and, as such, it bears the responsibility of celebrating and helping launch local talent, voices and, indeed, Canadian film. By defining Hollywood-made movies as ineligible for the International People’s Choice Award, unlike UK- and Ireland-based projects, TIFF blurs the line between itself and the American film industry, perhaps as part of its endless quest to make the fest indissociable from the start of Hollywood’s awards season. Still, it remains a landmark cultural institution of Canada and, hopefully, for Canadians before it is for LA-based studio fare.
With that in mind, let’s talk about this year’s Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award winner, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a uniquely Canadian documentary fever dream by Winnipeg filmmaker Matthew Rankin. There’s also Serville Poblete’s Sunburn, a Toronto-set summery daydream that was awarded the Best Canadian Film prize…
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BRIAN MULRONEY, Matthew Rankin
A Guy Maddin acolyte whose connections to that icon of Manitoban experimental cinema run deeper than you might assume, Matthew Rankin is an artist both indebted to his influences and altogether unique, almost caught in a category of his own. If you thought, like I did, that you’d pinned him down as a pastiche master perpetuating a local cinematic tradition through his vast collection of shorts and the feature The Twentieth Century, Universal Language would’ve proven you wrong. That 2024 masterpiece, imagining a Persian, Brutalist Winnipeg inspired by New Iranian Cinema, left me feeling unmoored, the rug pulled from under my feet in the best possible way.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is almost comforting then, drawing back from Universal Language’s gestures toward an international, interconnected, perchance inter-dimensional, cinema to return to the same territory as The Twentieth Century. They’re both portraits of Canadian Prime Ministers that consider them and their legacies through psychedelic imagery, using retro stylings to celebrate the possibilities of the cinematic form and lampoon a certain strand of nationalistic rhetoric. However, while the earlier film was a soundstage re-enactment under an Expressionist camera’s gaze, this latest effort is a different animal.
For one, it’s labeling itself a documentary and, technically speaking, that’s accurate. Moreover, it’s one of those non-fiction exercises whose raw material comes exclusively from archival footage, refusing to impose the present’s perspective through conventional means like talking-head interviews, expert testimony, contextualizing contemporaneous B-roll, and the like. Not that a critical eye is absent. On the contrary, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney almost feels like an attempt to understand political history through the ghosts burned onto old TV screens and the memories of those who, at the time, were perhaps too young to understand what they were seeing.
Rankin was born in 1980, so he was only four years old when Mulroney’s ascent reached its zenith, after years of cozying up to the Tory leadership and a stint as the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada's opposition leader. The man became Prime Minister in 1984 and remained in that office until overwhelming unpopularity forced his resignation in 1993. Effectively, the film’s director spent his childhood and tweendom absorbing the idea of Brian Mulroney through the imperfect awareness of youth and, most importantly for this doc, the media landscape of the time, be it news, skewed and fair, campaign ads and outright propaganda.
The film before us doesn’t so much express the cold reality of Brian Mulroney and his policies as it parades the absurdities of Canadian politics as misremembered by someone who mostly saw him as a clown smiling through the TV glow. And be sure that Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney glows. It’s positively phosphorescent, full of optic manipulation and superimposed words, collage-y bits and all the colors of the neon rainbow that turn it into something closer to the kind of video art one finds running 24/7 in an art gallery than the Maddin-esque gestures of archeological madness that have defined so much of Rankin’s image in the cinephile’s imagination.
Two steps forward, one step back, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney runs the risk of being too insular and solipsistic for its own good. It’s so fixated on examining the specter of politics through a multimedia kaleidoscope, and on politicians themselves as consumable fictions, constructed characters, that it can abstract the real-world effects of these power plays to the point that the entire movie falls into the same lunacy it’s commenting on. The film is complicit in what it’s criticizing. Part of it is intentional, surely. After all, surrendering to absurdism may be the only way to tackle such matters honestly. It’s a dark conclusion to reach, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
These figures, herein portrayed and transmogrified, accrued influence through systems that amount to self-promotional theater rather than material action to better people’s lives. The ruinous realities that came from their actions are fodder for quasi-Dadaist video comedy, a movie-sized museum installation high on its own supply, happy to disconnect completely and reach for the unreality that can only exist on screen. It’s both an attack and a mulish refusal to accept the circus of it all. And, for sure, there’s great cynicism informing the way Rankin approaches Canadian history, or, at least, that’s what comes across in this film.
On the other hand, good humor is ever-present, reliable, and obsessively insistent on turning everything into a joke to slap us across the face, wake us up, or maybe push us further into a dream state. Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney is a trance-like trip, a work I can’t recommend enough as audiovisual art but find troubling as a political documentary, thanks to the responsibilities usually projected onto such things. That it unsettles, leaving space for resistance to its tactics, only makes Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney a more essential piece of filmmaking. In the end, it’s as prone to be consumed in the way of hallucinatory entertainment as it is to command a reckoning between itself and the viewer.
SUNBURN, Serville Poblete
To be young is to exist in suspension, sometimes blissful, often harrowing, between what seem like too-close and too-faraway states of being. Many of the year’s best filmmakers have explored these ideas, though few have done it with as much joy and infectious energy as Serville Poblete. He sets the action in summer, that season artists always seem to connect with the ephemeral nature of good times fated to fade before you’ve had the opportunity to enjoy them to their fullest. Not just any summer, though, but an unusually hot Toronto summer. And one day, the power goes out, AC units dead and a whole neighborhood left to sweat out their will to live.
Oh, but Sunburn is so full of life as to make that last phrase an antithesis to the whole project, its ethos, pathos, the sheer movie magic that courses through it and reaches out to you, on the other side of the screen, leaving one drunk or high or somewhere in the glorious between. Because this is an intoxicating picture, one that uses a working-class high-rise community as the microcosm through which it touches on a broad tapestry of life experiences. All young and restless and ready to waste away the burning hours with friends, lovers, brothers, sisters, and the viewer they can’t see but to whom they offer their sweet companionship.
These characters, mostly racial and immigrant minorities in Toronto's social landscape, are just cool like that. If only they could physically cool off, but that solace always seems beyond their reach. At times, it almost feels like the heat is wringing them out, wet towel-like, in more ways than one. It turns their bodies into fountains of hot perspiration but also pulls out strong emotions and confessions, vulnerability between pals and the aftermath of a bombshell revelation. Believe it or not, an afternoon is enough time for friendships to be tested and lifelong bonds to be put at risk of dissolution, for them to be reinforced or to transform.
It inexorably happens through the haziness of a day too hot for one to think straight. Maybe that’s why the cast seems to jump from registers so smoothly, with promising new faces like Joshua Obra, Arianna Shannon and Dashawn Lloyd Blackwood, going from broad comedy to naturalistic heartbreak and back again, sometimes in the span of a line-reading or even a gesture. Poblete’s script helps, but one shouldn’t underestimate how much his ability with actors, some of them getting their first screen credit in Sunburn, is key to the whole thing working so smoothly. And smooth it goes, flowing and transcending.
Indeed, such qualities go beyond matters of character and performance to reach a formalist vitality I wasn’t expecting from what is, essentially, a hang-out movie. Poblete and DP Christian Bielz negotiate shifting perspectives and subjectivities, often latching onto characters for a minute before letting go and drifting away, wholly separate from any one person’s individual experience but inspired by the urban space itself, the motion of the breeze, the call of birds flying above. It feels like poetry being improvised in the moment, yet so assuredly assembled one cannot presume pure spontaneity. If possible, the editing is even more impressive.
Poblete himself is credited with the cutting, mixing in animation and other stylistic flourishes for a rhapsody of cinema drunk on the medium's plasticity and the foolhardiness of youth on an afternoon spent slacking with friends. That being said, if I were to single out one element out of Sunburn’s exquisite construction, one only aspect to give a standing ovation to, it’d have to be the music, borrowed, curated and original, all of it together. The soundscape as a whole, by Lucas Prokaziuk and Cait MacIntosh, is a minor miracle, but the score is on a league of its own.
Aaron Paris, a Chinese-Canadian composer best known for his contributions to bigger artists’ albums (Grande’s Eternal Sunshine springs to mind), is Sunburn’s secret weapon. He’s also a first-time film scorer, if his credits are to be believed, making this achievement all the more impressive in how it captures the euphoria and bittersweet feeling woven through so many of the characters’ stories, their high aspirations, and the knowledge that some dreams will never be anything but dreams. Such complex emotion somehow resounds through his lush score, which seems to guide the camera rather than react to it. It makes Sunburn a rhapsody for this crowd and their Toronto, for the young everywhere, and for that muggy, mindless marvel of a hot summer day when you lie listless and let yourself float, suspended above the world.
Canadian films that premiere at TIFF, even those that leave the festival bearing laurels, can struggle to gain much recognition abroad. Let’s hope Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney and Sunburn find international distributors, the acclaim and visibility they deserve.
Reader Comments (3)
This is a beautifully written review that really captures the energy, emotions, and fleeting magic of youth. The way Sunburn uses the summer heat, music, and everyday friendships to explore deeper feelings sounds truly special. It’s wonderful to see independent filmmaking celebrated for its creativity and ability to connect with audiences on such a personal level.
@Cláudio-
Any chance you have time for an EVA MARIE SAINT post? A writeup with some of her notable works. She was such a beauty!
DAVID S -- I feel you, but I also wrote a celebration of Eva Marie Saint two years ago for her centennial. Doing the same thing for her obituary would feel both sad and a tad redundant.
Here's the original post: https://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2024/7/6/happy-100-eva-marie-saint.html