Canadian films about self-discovery

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.

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.

Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.

Set in cold rural Quebec at Christmas time, we follow the coming of age of a young boy and the life of his family which owns the town's general store and undertaking business. Mon Oncle Antoine is Director Claude Jutra's masterpiece: A poignant, starkly honest, but humane film, shot through with authenticity from beginning to end. Realized with an unflagging artistic vision, Mon Oncle Antoine poetically portrays a young boy's coming of age, vividly capturing the Quebec mining town in which he lives.

The estranged daughter (Lauren Lee Smith) of a recently deceased filmmaker gains a new understanding of her father when she offers to create a retrospective of his work.

Marie is a Toronto police officer. One evening, her husband Joshua and their son Nicky are brutally murdered in their car. Marie quickly links Pablo Molina, an Argentinian drug trafficker who she'd arrested a few months earlier, with the crime. In despair, Marie heads to Argentina on the tracks of the killer. A journey of revenge and a journey to come to terms with her loss.

A depressed dentist in mid-life crisis tries to learn why one of his happiest patients suddenly commits suicide, and a dark comedic adventure ensues.

In the midst of a midlife crisis of faith, a man finds hope where he least expects it – his hometown. James Moore (Golden Globe nominee Corbin Bernsen) is a former pastor who returns home to discover a family new to the area has been killed in a mysterious fire, and his childhood friend is implicated in the murder. Convinced of his friend’s innocence, James sets out on a mission to find the truth… and in the process, rediscovers his own lost faith. An uplifting drama about faith, family, and the powerful ties that bind a community together.

A father and daughter live a perfect but mysterious existence in Forest Park, a beautiful nature reserve near Portland, Oregon, rarely making contact with the world. But when a small mistake tips them off to authorities, they are sent on an increasingly erratic journey in search of a place to call their own.

A disgruntled Democrat follows through on a drunken campaign promise to move to Canada if George "Dubya" Bush gets re-elected.

After weeks of traveling through Europe, the immature William finds himself in Copenhagen, the place of his father’s birth. He befriends the youthful Effy, who works in William’s hotel as part of an internship program, and they set off to find William’s last living relative. Effy’s mix of youthful exuberance and wisdom challenges William unlike any woman ever has. As the attraction builds, he must come to grips with destabilizing elements of his family’s sordid past.

Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson) has been diagnosed with cancer. With a grim chance of survival in the best case scenario even if he immediately begins treatment, he instead decides to take a motorcycle trip from Toronto through the Canadian prairies to British Columbia.

In order to escape her looming post-graduation fate that includes student debt and zero romantic prospects, Blake Conway becomes a sugar baby. As the aspiring journalist and hopeless romantic documents the adventure, she sets out on a quest to figure out if society is right to judge these women and if her own self worth comes with a price.

Scott Calvin is an ordinary man, who accidentally causes Santa Claus to fall from his roof on Christmas Eve and is knocked unconscious. When he and his young son finish Santa's trip and deliveries, they go to the North Pole, where Scott learns he must become the new Santa and convince those he loves that he is indeed, Father Christmas.

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

For his French-class assignment, a high school student weaves his family history in a news story involving terrorism, and goes on to invite an Internet audience in on the resulting controversy.

A college student suspects that a nurse may harm her lonely, widowed mother.

A drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized after a fatal car accident.

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.

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.

A mistaken delivery in Mumbai's famously efficient lunchbox delivery system (Mumbai's Dabbawallahs) connects a young housewife to a stranger in the dusk of his life. They build a fantasy world together through notes in the lunchbox. Gradually, this fantasy threatens to overwhelm their reality.

A disgruntled teenager, sent to do community service at a rundown Karate school, enters an MMA tournament to face the man who killed his parents.

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.

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.

The film centers on three brothers who, upon learning they only have a few days left to live, set off to reverse a lifetime of mistakes. Hopper and Simmons are playing the brothers' father and uncle, respectively, while Caan is one of the brothers. Helfer is Caan's girlfriend, a woman with a dangerous past.

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

After an accidental drug overdose, a talented teenage DJ goes to live with his estranged father in a small Army town, where he gets to the bottom of his own pain and learns empathy for others.

A shy high schooler struggles to lose his virginity before the local Satanic cult can sacrifice him to the devil.

Elizabeth Thatcher, a cultured young teacher in 1910, fears leaving her comfortable world in the city. But when she accepts a teaching position in a frontier town, she finds new purpose and love with a handsome Royal Canadian Mountie.

After living abroad, Lana returns to the United States, and finds that her uncle is a reclusive vagabond with psychic wounds from the Vietnam War.

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.

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.

Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, inhabiting a “beautiful gender of one.”

The Sublet is a suspense driven psychological thriller about Joanna, a new mom coping with her baby alone in an odd sublet apartment. As her husband neglects her to focus on his career, Joanna questions her sanity as she discovers a violent past to the apartment and suspects that the building may be haunted.

Not long after moving into her own place, Maggie finds herself with two unsolicited roommates: her recently divorced mother, Lila, and her young brother. The timing is especially bad, considering Maggie has fallen hard for an attractive woman, Kim, only hours before they move in. What could be a nonissue becomes increasingly complicated -- since Maggie's family is unaware of her sexual orientation, and Maggie is not open to sharing that information.

An unexpected affair quickly escalates into a heart-stopping reality for two women whose passionate connection changes their lives forever.

Based on a real WWII vet and family man turned bank robber. Disillusioned by his post war circumstances, Eddie Boyd is torn between the need to provide for his young family and an unfulfilled dream to head to Hollywood to become a star. He discovers a way to do both, robbing banks Hollywood style, but his dream leads him down a path of danger and tragedy.

In South Dakota, in an Indian reservation, an old storyteller Indian asks his grandson Shane, who is in trouble owing money to some bad guys, to take his old pony and him to Albuquerque to the great powwow, an Indian meeting. While traveling, Grandpa tells mysterious Indian tales of love, friendship and magic.

This is the portrait of two recently released prisoners (Pierrette Robitaille and Romane Bohringer) who learn to live in a sugar shack deep in the forest.

An edgy comedy about the sexual adventures in parenthood.

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.

Ten years ago, Kate Collins (Ashley Jones) was a different person. Literally. She was living in Chicago, working as a bartender, and going by her real name ‘Stephanie Wickers.’ That all changed when she witnessed the murder of her boss by a ruthless member of an up and coming crime syndicate named Alek Ravik (Al Sapienza). Knowing that Klebanov saw her, she faked her death, changed her name, and went into hiding in Philadelphia. When a crooked cop retires and young, eager Detective Miesen (Alain Chanoine) is chosen to head a new task force to tackle crime syndicates in Chicago, the unsolved murder case is reopened. Miesen believes that Kate/Stephanie is still alive and begins to look for her. Unfortunately, so does Alek.

While visiting his hometown during Christmas, a man comes face-to-face with his old high school crush whom he was best friends with – a woman whose rejection of him turned him into a ferocious womanizer.

It's not unusual for alcoholic cop Lou to black out and wake up in unfamiliar surroundings, but lately things have taken a turn for the strange...and hairy. WolfCop is the story of one cop's quest to become a better man. One transformation at a time.

The Gamache, tailors from father to son, have been dressing the Mafia family Paternò for three generation. Vincent "Vince" Gamache works on behalf of Frank the godfather with his eldest son Giaco. Vince, reckless and rash, seeks to earn his stripes by impressing the godfather. Without the Paternò knowing, he stages a big operation and is promoted. Fuming with jealousy, Giaco discovers that Vince committed a monstrous act during his stroke. The Gamache disown Vince and war begins.

Celebrated European actor Sophie Bernard is in Montreal shooting a movie, and she's taking the opportunity to visit her gay son Thomas in the hope of bridging the rift that's grown between them. But Thomas has his own agenda for their time together; he intends to finally get some answers as to the identity of his father. Meanwhile, at Ville-Marie Hospital, paramedic Pierre struggles with PTSD, and though he has support in Marie, a nurse who keeps the overflowing emergency room running, it's uncertain whether he'll remain able to cope with the high intensity of his work. Each of these four characters is dealing with emotional damage — and on one dark Montreal night, their lives will all intersect in a fateful occurrence at Ville-Marie.

When two friends open a Halloween fun house on Devil's Night it is all fun and games until their former sorority sisters begin to arrive. These six sisters are confronted by their past as the night spins out of control.

Sick of her life, housewife Nancy just wants it to be over and done with, but rather than kill herself, she hires a stranger from the Internet to do the job for her. But fate takes a strange turn when she meets her killer and the two fall in love. Of course, Nancy realizes that love and murder do not naturally go hand in hand.

In 1918, a young, disillusioned Adolph Hitler strikes up a friendship with a Jewish art dealer while weighing a life of passion for art vs. talent at politics

Natural changes have the clans moving. Iza, medicine woman of the "Clan of the Cave Bear" finds little Ayla from the "others"' clan - tradition would have the clan kill Ayla immediately, but Iza insists on keeping her. When the little one finds a most needed new cave, she's allowed to stay - and thrive.