Northern delights

Ask the new wave of Canadian directors why they're getting calls from Hollywood and the answer is easy: Canada's thriving film industry has allowed them the freedom to tell the stories they want to tell, in the way they want.

In a Hollywood built around commercial success - often at the cost of originality - Canadian directors are now bringing their voices to major feature films. So far, the response has been good.

Awards season buzz is already mounting around Quebec native Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners and Montreal-born Jean-Marc Vallee's Dallas Buyers Club, two Hollywood-backed efforts that premiered to strong reviews at the 38th annual Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) earlier this month.

"I think we're at the start of something really great," says writer-director-editor Michael Dowse, who helmed The F Word and co-wrote The Grand Seduction; both also premiered at Toronto. "I think it's a sign of our system nurturing directors and letting them tell stories that aren't necessarily hinged on being completely commercial."

So while previous generations of Canadian filmmakers such as Norman Jewison and Paul Haggis moved south to pursue their dreams, the strong local industry has homegrown directors now choosing to stay put.

Vallee, who broke out with the 2005 French Canadian feature C.R.A.Z.Y., has since made films in the US, Britain, France and Quebec, which he has no plans to leave.

Villeneuve, meanwhile, brought his first Hollywood effort - the intense thriller Prisoners, which stars Australian actor Hugh Jackman as a Pennsylvania man who takes desperate measures to try to get his kidnapped daughter back - to the festival while also displaying his distinctly Canadian, art-house voice in the doppelganger drama Enemy.