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Canada lands at Cannes with a mission to shift the conversation — on the Croisette, at least — from the havoc U.S. tariffs could wreak on the global film industry to the benefits of creative collaboration and co-production with Canadian talent and companies.

As recent successes (Matt Johnson’s SXSW Midnighter audience-award winner “Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie”) and this year’s festival and market titles reveal, Canadian filmmakers are twisting horror and comedy into new shapes and reinforcing the country’s historic strongholds of animation and documentary with new ideas. Over the past decade, holistic, regionally focused companies have been springing up and producing auteur films that are redefining what Canadian cinema is. Indigenous Canadian films, creators and companies are a catalyst in this gradual paradigm shift and have become a regular active presence at major festivals and markets.

“We do arthouse cinema in Canada,” says Montreal producer Sylvain Corbeil,...

After making its North American Premiere in the Fantasia Film Festival’s Camera Lucida sidebar, Seth A. Smith’s dystopian sci-fi thriller “Tin Can” was picked up by Canada’s levelFILM for domestic distribution.

In the film, a new fungal disease called Coral is spreading rapidly across the planet. Parasitologist Fret is working on a possible treatment when she is attacked outside her workplace, waking up an unspecific amount of time later in a claustrophobic life prolonging cryochamber. Not knowing where she is, how she got there or why, Fret fights to escape the confines of her cell, learning that there are others from her past similarly confined in nearby chambers of their own.

Nova Scotia-based Cut/Off/Tail Pictures, producers of Smith’s previous award-winning feature “The Crescent,” also backed “Tin Can,” a Panorama Audience Award finalist at Sitges 2020. Smith teamed once again with long-time colleague Darcy Spidle on the screenplay...

It starts by enveloping us in marbleizing paint — overlapping colors raked to warp dots into abstract patterns — and the loud aural pulses of a musical soundscape as heavy and permanent as those oils are fluidly malleable. We assume it’s merely a sensory aesthetic Seth A. Smith constructs to provide the tone for the subtle horrors still on the horizon, but don’t be surprised if you begin to interpret each new artwork as a self-portrait of characters we’ve yet to meet. Treat them as mood rings simultaneously displaying the strength of will and love to keep each hue from merging into muddy brown and the vulnerability of time folding in on itself like each layer of curved lines. They’re products of Beth’s (Danika Vandersteen) turmoil, a fight intentionally misconstrued.

Smith presents this overload of vision and sound as a contrast to the somberly quiet drama that...

Exclusive: Seth Smith’s psychedelic horror filmed at a remote beach house on Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

Raven Banner holds Canadian distribution rights to The Crescent, which centres on a woman and her young son following an unexpected death in the family.

While the mother and toddler struggle to find spiritual healing, a mysterious force from the sea threatens to tear their souls apart.

Danika Vandersteen stars with Woodrow Graves, the son of Smith and producer Nancy Urich.

Darcy Spidle wrote the screenplay and Urich serves as producer. Executive producer Rob Cotterill previously produced Hobo With A Shotgun.

Smith’s first feature Lowlife about a living drug premiered at Fantasia in 2012 and went on to win the audience award for best feature at the Atlantic Film Festival.

Producers retain international rights.