The membership has chosen the three finalists for the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award: The Body Remembers When the World Broken Open co-directed by Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Antigone by Sophie Deraspe and Firecrackers by Jasmin Mozaffari.

The winner will be named at the 23rd TFCA awards gala, to be held at The Omni King Edward Hotel in Toronto on January 9, 2020. The honour carries a record-setting $100,000 cash prize, the richest film award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000.

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What Mozaffari does better than almost anyone I can think of is dramatize the illusory nature of control. Lou and Chantal have some but not a lot, and sometimes the ways in which they try to get it back (by, say, smashing stuff up or fighting) only tightens the vise. Fighting back feels good and sometimes works but sometimes doesn’t, because the real power isn’t with them. The real power is with the men who have guns they don’t even need to fire to do permanent damage.

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Sliding in tone from ferocity to joy to a numbed hopelessness, “Firecrackers” presents young bodies as currency in the games of dangerous drifters. Here, all the men may not be monsters, but all the monsters are definitely men.

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…the kind of discovery I’m kicking myself for overlooking nearly a year earlier, when it premiered at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival. Mozaffari is a major talent — and one whom her fellow Canadians had been tracking for some time — and in this case, TIFF deserves credit for championing a voice who’s sure to be recognized by the international film community soon enough. Like a young Andrea Arnold, Mozaffari has an incredible eye for the details that bring a situation or place to life, working with inexperienced actors to create electrifying characters and a sense of edgy unpredictability.

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Kurimsky is astounding as the mercurial, unpredictable Lou, wounded one moment, a warrior the next. “Firecrackers” isn’t just a confident feature debut from Mozaffari, but a daring one, the kind of fast and furious feminine filmmaking that heralds the arrival of several exciting new talents.

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…Though it's built atop the girls' determination to get themselves to New York City (their dubious assumption that things will be better there goes unquestioned, understandably), the pic avoids painting their ambition as something more than it is. Neither over-bleak nor falsely heroic, the movie sensitively observes a short span that, however things work out, is going to be a turning point in their lives.

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