Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film

Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film is the most exhaustive and up-to-date reference book on Canadian film and filmmakers, combining 700 reviews and biographical listings with a detailed chronology of major events in Canadian film and television history. Compiled by Wyndham Wise, the editor and publisher of Take One, Canada’s most respected film magazine, with a foreword by Canadian director Patricia Rozema, this is the only reference book of its kind published in English.

Each film title is listed with credits, a mini review, and significant awards. Biographical listings of directors, producers, actors, writers, animators, cinematographers, distributors, exhibitors, and independent filmmakers are accompanied by date and place of birth, date of death if applicable, a brief career overview, and a filmography. Wise celebrates Canadian achievement on both a national and an international scale, and juxtaposes the distinctly Canadian with Canada’s exports to Hollywood: Maury Chaykin and Jim Carrey, John Candy and William Shatner, Mon Oncle Antoine and Porky’s, Highway 61 and Meatballs, The Red Violin and The Art of War.

From great early Hollywood stars like Walter Huston, Fay Wray, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, and Marie Dressler, to our current crop of star directors - including Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand, Peter Mettler, Guy Maddin, and Robert Lepage - Canadians have made an important but largely unrecorded contribution to the history of world cinema. Impressive for its breadth of coverage, refreshing in its opinionated informality, this comprehensive and lively look at Canadian film culture at the start of the twenty-first century admirably fills the gap.

Wyndham Wise is the publisher and editor of Take One: Film and Television in Canada, published five times annually.