GHOST BFF is a comedy web series (and a serious discussion of the stigma surrounding mental illness) created by Vanessa Matsui. It centers on Amy, an artist who no longer paints. Amy’s life is disrupted by a visit from the ghost of her best friend Tara, who committed suicide three years earlier. All 19 episodes can be streamed on KindaTV.

Kaniehtiio Horn (Tara’s ghost) is the blunt and sometimes judgemental artist Tess in ALICE, DARLING, a thriller written by Alanna Francis (who also wrote the screenplay for Aisling Chin-Yee’s film THE REST OF US). Alice (Anna Kendrick) and her two best friends, Tess and Sophie (Wummi Mosaku), decide to spend a week together at a lakeside cabin, but Sophie and Tess have become concerned about Alice’s secretiveness regarding her boyfriend Simon (Charlie Carrick), and the trip is really a cleverly disguised intervention. Then a local girl goes missing, and Simon unexpectedly joins them. Director Mary Nighy told Annie Coalo of Women in Hollywood that the film “…felt like an important story to tell right now, about the degree to which women can lose themselves in murky sexual relationships, without even realizing how far they’ve lost their sense of self or their bearings. And I thought it could be a powerful paean to the value and redemptive qualities of friendship between women, in all their messy, sometimes rivalrous, sometimes sisterly, glory.” ALICE, DARLING had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and can be streamed on STARZ.

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Vanessa Matsui (Amy – the only one who can see Tara’s ghost) will direct MIDNIGHT AT THE PARADISE, a drama starring Liane Balaban and Alan Hawko as former teenage lovers Iris and Alex who first fell in love at a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave drama BREATHLESS. The two meet again years later when they both turn up at another screening of the same film at Toronto’s Paradise Theatre, and spend a night figuring out how this chance meeting might affect their future. The late Kenneth Walsh (best known as Windom Earle in TWIN PEAKS) makes his final film appearance as an aging critic named Max. MIDNIGHT AT THE PARADISE premiered at the 2022 Whistler Film Festival.

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Jon Cor (Tara’s former boyfriend Brent) will be Logan in Wendy Ord‘s romantic dramedy THE WAY TO THE HEART, about an award-winning chef at a big-city restaurant (Ava, played by Meghan Heffern) who, at least according to her boss Julia (Sandra Clermont), has lost her enthusiasm for food preparation. “Go somewhere,” Julia tells Ava, “anywhere that will remind you of why you cook.” Ava returns home but finds little there to inspire her until a chance encounter with her old friend Logan (who almost runs her over with his car) rekindles both her passion for food and their previous relationship. Written by Alexa Gilker and filmed in Prince George, British Columbia, THE WAY TO THE HEART can be streamed on TUBI.

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Christina Rosato (Brent’s wife Brooklyn) will be Diana Vega in ARIEL: BACK TO BUENOS AIRES, the story of Davie and Diana, a brother and sister who return to Argentina (the country of their birth), learn to dance tango. In the process they learn much about the sordid secrets of both their family and their country. Writing for Talkhouse, Rosato calls Diana Vega her “dream role”, and describes the Argentine tango as “a sort of shared meditation with a stranger to beautiful music, while keeping form in an abrazo…it was born of people living in the poorest areas, from sex workers to overworked service people, who had little joys in life other than to unleash their stress and troubles and get lost in dance.” Tango world champion Alison Murray wrote and directed ARIEL, which began production in Buenos Aires in 2019, was interrupted by the pandemic, and completed filming in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2021. The film can be streamed on TUBI.

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Dan Beirne (Amy’s fiancé Mitchell) has a supporting role in the comedy I LIKE MOVIES, the main character of which is an ambitious seventeen-year-old film aficionado named Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen). Larry dreams of attending film school at NYU, and gets hired (in 2003) by a Burlington, Ontario video store. Alienated from his mother (Krista Bridges) and his best friend (Percy Hynes White), he develops a complex friendship with the older female manager of the store (Alana, played by Romina D’Ugo). Director Chandler Levack told Stephen Saito of The Moveable Fest: “I’ve watched a lot of these coming-of-age stories and I feel like if a man directed this movie, Alana would just be this quirky muse for Lawrence. They would have his first kiss in the back of the video store and she wouldn’t say a goddamn word…It took me a couple of drafts to realize, ‘No, her perspective is so important and her insight could be the linchpin into Lawrence’s coming of age.'” I LIKE MOVIES is available from most VOD services.

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Rick Roberts (Mitchell’s dad) will be Paul, a single father with a traumatic past, in Au nord d’Albany (NORTH OF ALBANY). Single mom Annie (Céline Bonnier) leaves Montreal for the US with her young son Felix (Eliott Plamondon) and her teenage daughter Sara (Zeneb Blanchet), following an altercation in which Sarah severely injures the school bully. Their car breaks down just outside a small town in the Adirondacks on a Saturday, and Paul (who is also the local auto mechanic) tells her he can’t fix it until his shop opens on Monday. Then Sarah’s diary goes missing, and, worrying it may have gotten into the wrong hands, Sarah runs away, forcing Annie and Paul to work together to find her. Director Marianne Farley co-wrote the screenplay (with Claude Brie). Au nord du Albany is available from Apple TV Canada.

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Lindsay MacKay, (who directed 16 episodes of Ghost BFF) directs the musical romance THE SWEARING JAR (Kate Hewlett‘s film adaptation of her own stage musical of the same name). Adelaide Clemens stars as a music teacher named Carey, who surprises her husband Simon (Patrick J Adams), whom she believes to be her true soulmate, with a musical tribute to their relationship as a birthday present. (Carey and Simon are trying to at least minimize their habit of swearing too much, hence the film’s title.) Then she begins to fall in love with Owen (Douglas Smith), the guitarist she hired to perform. Filmed last year in Toronto and Hamilton Ontario, THE SWEARING JAR can be streamed on STARZ.