Canadian films about rejuvenation

The mid-70's: A timid young New Yorker leads an uneventful life until he is fatefully exposed to the pulsating rhythms of a brand-new genre of music....disco. Unable to control his murderous impulses that stem from a traumatic childhood experience, Duane Lewis transforms into a dangerous serial killer exiled to Montreal.

Separation opens with an absolutely innocent shot of a young girl riding a bicycle. It isn’t until later in the film that we learn exactly what we were watching. And that is exactly what Separation is all about. This is a film that masterfully uses sleight of hand like a highly-skilled magician to show us one thing while setting up something completely different. And writer/director Greg White brings it all together in a tense film with an exciting climax that pulls back all the curtains.

Joshua must protect his twin sister, Emma, who possesses supernatural abilities and keep her safe from an unstoppable secret agent hunting them for an experiment in a classified government program.

Lizzie Richfield is at a crossroads when she lands a job as house manager for the exquisite Ashford Estate in the Virginia countryside. While planning one final Christmas Eve gala for the Marley family, Lizzie finds herself drawn to Robert—even as Kip pursues her.

An edgy comedy about the sexual adventures in parenthood.

This is a film about a troubled teen, Sean Randall, who is falsely accused of planning a Columbine shooting scenario. It all begins when an unlikely bond forms between Sean (Connor Jessup) and a preppy teenage girl named Deanna Roy (Alexia Fast). Deanna's boyfriend is deeply threatened by Sean and Deanna's friendship, resulting in a violent confrontation. Seeking to protect himself, Sean issues a death threat online - and is swiftly arrested. When the police raid Sean's home, they find rifles, shotguns, knives and ammunition - all property of Sean's father Ricky (Michael Buie), an avid hunter. They also find a supposed "hit list" with twenty names of people who have tormented Sean. The authorities and the media proclaim another Columbine has been narrowly averted, and soon Sean faces a terrifying imprisonment in a youth detention facility. Sean's only hope is to overcome his dark image, and prove his innocence to Deanna and to his community.

In the near future, as humanity prepares to set foot on Mars, Jacob Obus, an elderly musician, takes pride in slowing down time by playing instruments inspired by women's bodies, designed by his friend Arthur. A love triangle develops when Jacob and Arthur both fall in love with Avril, a young photographer. Enter Eugène Spaak, Arthur's father, an inventor and cosmologist who unveils a new theory about man's desire to reach Mars and helps Jacob find the true meaning of life and love.

Set in the small town of Devil's Gate, North Dakota, the film examines the disappearance of a local woman and her young son. Schull plays an FBI agent who helps the local sheriff search for answers. Partnering with a deputy , they track down the missing woman's husband and find that nothing is as it seems.

Ex-military specialist Clair Hamilton returns home from her tour in the Middle East due to her father's passing and to claim her inheritance. Her son is then kidnapped and held for ransom by a gang led by a mysterious figure known only as “Father”.

An elderly couple fight against local authorities in rural New Brunswick to build their final home.

A young married woman from Montreal's Orthodox Jewish community finds freedom from the strictures of her faith through her relationship with a young man who is mourning the death of his estranged father.

A scientist discovers the bodies of three frozen genetically modified Russians buried in the Canadian North. Upon thawing them out he realizes he has unleashed a deadly threat to Western society and must stop them at all costs.

Wrongly condemned for killing his wife, a man finds himself in a mysterious institution where he is sentenced to relive her death for eternity.

In the harsh, wintry woods of rural Quebec, Bruce (Thomas Haden Church), a down-on-his-luck snowplow operator, accidentally kills a man during a drunken night joyride. Stricken with panic, he hides the body and takes to the deep wilderness in hopes of outrunning both the authorities and his own conscience. But as both begin to close in, Bruce falls apart mentally and morally and mysteries unravel to reveal who he was before the accident, the truth behind his victim, and the circumstances that brought them together in a single moment.

A once-famous painter rediscovers inspiration when he befriends a sleepwalking cannibal.

Making the most of the family home while her parents are away, 22-year-old Nicole is enjoying a peaceful summer with her best friend Véronique. But when Nicole’s older brother shows up with his band to record an album, the girls’ friendship is put to the test.

A once-celebrated kid detective, now 31, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bouts of self-pity. Until a naive client brings him his first 'adult' case, to find out who brutally murdered her boyfriend.

As we follow a mother and her son, we delve into a past marred by an accident that tears them apart. She will become a renowned artist and healer, and he will grow into his own and a peculiar falconer who bears the marks of a double absence. In the present, a young journalist will bring about an encounter between the two that puts the very meaning of life and art into question, so that we may contemplate the possibility of living life to its fullest, despite the uncertainties littering our paths.

A peculiar neighbor offers hope to a recent widow who is struggling to raise a teenager who is unpredictable and, sometimes, violent.

In northern Canada, a young boy sets a goal for himself to to reunite an abandoned polar bear cub with its mother. Goran Visnjic joins the cast as Muktuk, a half Inuit and half Canadian, who knows the terrain where the polar bears live and who agrees to help the boy.

The Joke Thief takes us on a journey of one man's last hurrah. Simon McCabe is a stand up comedian who has been making people laugh for 35 years. All his life he has been the life of the party, but now he is tired, miserable and almost washed up since he's never got a lucky break due to a reputation of joke stealing. One faithful night, his longtime friend and fellow comedian convinces a comedy club owner to give Simon some stage time and one last shot at redemption. On the ride down to his gig, Simon takes us on a whirlwind journey of his life, as he replays back special moments in an emotional series of flash backs that made him the sad, funny man that he is today.

Dr. Mary Harris, a single mother and emergency doctor by day, also moonlights as an underground angel of death - helping terminally ill patients who want to die and slip away on their own terms. So far Mary has managed to stay under the radar; but business is booming, and her double life is getting complicated. When her world starts to unravel, Mary realizes she's going to have to fight dirty if she's going to stay in the killing game.

A frustrated, angry teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to evoke a witch to kill her mother.

A stubborn idealist spies a bride on her way to her wedding and immediately falls in love with her.

Eight years after the disappearance of Cassandra, some disturbing incidents seem to indicate that she's still alive. Police, parents and Cassandra herself, will try to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.

A mild-mannered college professor discovers a look-alike actor and delves into the other man's private affairs.

Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while living on a remote and mysterious New England island in the 1890s.

Canada, the summer of 1898. A group of German settlers travel towards the far north in covered wagons with packhorses and their few possessions in tow. The seven travellers set off from Ashcroft, the final railway station. Along with their leader, flamboyant businessman Wilhelm Laser, they are hoping to find their fortune in the recently discovered goldfields of Dawson, but they have no idea of the stresses and dangers which lie ahead on their 2,500 kilometre journey. Before long uncertainty, cold weather and exhaustion begin to take their toll and conflicts escalate. The journey leads these men and women deeper and deeper into a menacing wilderness. (Berlinale.de)

The journey of a professional wrestler who becomes a small town pastor and moonlights as a masked vigilante fighting injustice. While facing crises at home and at the church, the Pastor must evade the police and somehow reconcile his violent secret identity with his calling as a pastor.

Summer war games between the neighborhood kids turns deadly serious when jealousy and betrayal enter the mix, in this alternately hilarious and horrifying black comedy that mixes equal parts Lord of the Flies and Roald Dahl.

During a raging snowstorm, a drifter returns home to the blue-collar bar located in the remote Canadian town where he was born. When he offers to settle an old debt with a grizzled bartender by telling him a story, the night's events quickly spin into a dark tale of mistaken identities, double-crosses and shocking violence.

A small fishing village must procure a local doctor to secure a lucrative business contract. When unlikely candidate and big city doctor Paul Lewis lands in their lap for a trial residence, the townsfolk rally together to charm him into staying. As the doctor’s time in the village winds to a close, acting mayor Murray French has no choice but to pull out all the stops and begin The Grand Seduction.

When Emily, a struggling baker in a small town, receives a handmade Christmas Calendar from a secret admirer, the local residents become obsessed with finding out the identity of the sender.

Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis falls in love with a fishmonger while working for him as a live-in housekeeper.

A young girl is abducted by a man, who claims that a cult is hunting her. His goal is to protect her until sunrise but while restrained, the young girl falls deathly ill. While her friends and family search for her, the source of her illness becomes more and more apparent. She’s not sick…she’s changing.

Former childhood pals Leo and Nikki are attracted to each other as adults—but will their feuding parents' rival pizzerias put a chill on their sizzling romance?

Six ambitious forensic undergrads are pitted against one another on a scientific expedition to a remote island, vying to win an esteemed trainee position with the FBI. Unbeknownst to them, the site was formerly used as an illegal biological testing ground for life-term criminals who were then left for dead. The arrival of the students disturbs the resting place, unleashing a pack of zombie criminal convicts who systematically hunt them down, one by one.

Starbuck is a 2011 Canadian comedy film directed by Ken Scott and written by Martin Petit and Ken Scott. The main character David Wozniak is a perpetual adolescent who discovers that, as a sperm donor, he has fathered 533 children. David, a deliveryman for a butcher shop, is being pursued by thugs because he owes them money. Next, he is advised that more than 100 of his offspring are trying to force the fertility clinic to reveal the true identity of "Starbuck", the pseudonym he used when donating sperm. In addition, his girlfriend Valérie is pregnant with his child but doesn't feel that he is mature enough to be a father. The film's title refers to a Canadian Holstein bull who produced hundreds of thousands of progeny by artificial insemination in the 1980s and 1990s.

A couple of college students decide to sign up for pharmaceutical testing of a new allergy drug to make some extra cash for their spring break trip. They quickly discover their two week stay will not be as easy as they first believed and fight to save themselves from the grips of the facility.

Husband and wife, Will and Dawn, are in financial crisis after learning the job Will was counting on to salvage their financial future has disappeared in the midst of a market collapse. They set out to drive home on the winter highway back to their city, and in a moment of altruism, pick up siblings Lee and Cheryl, a pair of hitchhikers on their way to start a new life. In the midst of the night they nearly collide with an old man wandering on the snowy highway, hyperthermic and horrifically frostbitten. While searching for his ID they discover a wad of cash, a hand drawn map with GPS coordinates, and a single gold coin inside his coat. Will and Dawn reluctantly go along with Lee’s plan to report him to the police as a John Doe and pocket the money. In an attempt to save their financial struggles, all four venture off into the snowy wilderness in search of the buried gold.

A rebellious teenager forced to repeat her last year of high school is caught between adolescence and adulthood - and between two very different male admirers.

Kira's skin starts to age rapidly, dry out and crumble away. But then she discovers that she can replace her own skin with somebody else's.

Gangster and deadbeat dad, Ulysses Pick, embarks on an unusual journey through his home.

A couple on a deep-wilderness hike become hopelessly lost within an aggressive black bear's territory.

When Charlie Harris ends up in a coma, he leaves the Hope-Zion Hospital in chaos - and his fiancée and fellow surgeon, Alex Reid, in a state of shock. As the staff of Hope-Zion races to save lives, comatose Dr. Harris wanders the halls of Hope-Zee in "spirit" form, not sure if he's a ghost or a figment of his own imagination.

Cocky young attorney Michael Gray finds himself framed for murder when an inmate he is defending violently kills himself during their interview at South River State Penitentiary. Now locked in the same nightmarish Cell 213 where his client died, he soon realizes that unnatural forces are behind a string of inmate suicides, making matters of guilt and innocence not as cut and dry as they seem.

Based on the New York Times bestselling book, Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke, the film will take viewers on a mouthwatering mystery that centers on Hannah Swensen, shop owner of the Cookie Jar where much of the town's gossip percolates along with the strong coffee. But when a mysterious murder occurs, Hannah turns into a culinary detective and finds herself trying to solve the crime while getting caught in an unexpected romantic mystery of her own.

A spectacular sled race through the village. Frankie-Four-Eyes and his team, including Sophie as the driver, take on the newcomers: the mysterious and conceited Zac and his athletic cousin Charlie.

With their father in prison for murder, siblings Alison and Brandon are instantly considered suspects when a string of killings plagues their town, and they must fight to clear their names.

Aurelie Laflamme feels alone in the world, especially since her father's death five years ago. What if her father had been an alien who left Earth to return to his own planet? In that case, Aurelie would be an alien too. That would explain many things such as why she feels different from others, especially her mother, why she can't string two words together without making a mistake, and why boys really get on her nerves. Through the pages of her diary, Aurelie confides her joys and sorrows, successes and failures, love and friendships, and tries to find her place.