The second iteration of CAFF, the County Adaptation Film Festival, offers a series of stylish, intricate, and engaging films, well suited to their context, and a set of intriguing conversations.

Sarah Polley and Emma Donoghue will be in town the last weekend of September, as well as radio host Sook-Yin Lee, graphic novelist Chester Brown, producer Damon D’Oliviera, and writer Tamara Faith Berger.

The Regent’s new Executive Director, John Galway, and CAFF’s co-founder, The Royal Hotel’s Sol Korngold, have curated a lineup full of familiar, and many Canadian, faces — actors, writers, and directors. CAFF’s focus on writing is particularly welcome. It creates endless opportunity for connections and conversations.

The festival launches Friday evening with the 2024 TIFF People’s Choice award-winner, Life of Chuck, from that peerless storyteller Stephen King, who also wrote Stand By Me. Much more memoir than horror, Life of Chuck insists on the wonder of human life in apocalyptic times.

CAFF’s focus on writing is particularly welcome.
It creates endless opportunity for connections and conversations.

The film is followed by a giant party in The Regent lobby, spilling outdoors to the laneway it shares with the library.

Saturday opens with a conversation with Emma Donoghue, whose novel, Room, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue wrote the screenplay for the film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

She is in town to discuss adapting her latest novel, The Paris Express, for the screen, as well as her adaptation of Helen MacDonald’s beloved H is for Hawk.

Saturday afternoon features a Mediterranean vacation, Bonjour Tristesse, last adapted from the novel by Francoise Sagan by Otto Preminger in 1958. Director Durga Chew-Bose’s stylish rendition recalls Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley for both vivid scenery and its careful tracing of character.

Saturday evening’s festivities feature Sarah Polley, who will be in the County for a screening of her 2006 film, Away From Her. The beauty and charm of this small-town Ontario film alleviate the terrible loss at its center, just as Grant’s love for his wife, Fiona, both intensifies and directs the grief he must endure at losing her to old age, to Alzheimer’s, and to another man. The film is a quiet masterpiece dedicated to everyday life. Its all-star cast — Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis — doesn’t hurt.

Based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” Away From Her was nominated for two Oscars and won seven Genies, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. The enormously gifted Polley has since written the miniseries Alias Grace, from the novel by Margaret Atwood. She also wrote and directed Women Talking, based on the novel by Miriam Toews, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. 

I am pretty sure this film and conversation, so perfectly suited to the local audience, will sell out, so be sure to get your tickets quickly.

Sunday opens with a film for filmmakers, the Zodiac Killer Project, which screened at this year’s Sundance Festival. It tells the story of writer and director Charlie Shackleton’s attempt to make a true crime documentary even though unable to option the rights to the book. Every CAFF must feature a “best failed adaptation” from now on. The film, a documentary about an attempt to make a documentary, skewers our overheated “true crime” moment. There are echoes here of last year’s witty failed-adaptation feature, Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation.

Later Sunday afternoon, Sook-Yin Lee and Chester Brown are in town for a screening of Paying for It, Lee’s live-action film of her ex-partner Brown’s graphic novel about the breakup of their relationship.

Both Lee and Brown play themselves in this indie adaptation, set in an intimately rendered Toronto, the scene of the extended breaking-up. The film is shot on location — in their former house as well as in the restaurants where they joined friends, as the film tracks their efforts to make sense of love and sex in and around Kensington Market.

Sook-Yin Lee is well known as a former radio host on CBC Radio, while Chester Brown is the author of seven books and is best known for the non-fiction graphic novel Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.

The Festival Finale features the Canadian-Belgian thriller, Steal Away, which will have just come off its world premiere at TIFF.

Adapted from Karolyn Smardz Frost’s Steal Away Home, this highly stylized film set in an alternate reality explores colliding cultures, and identities. Teenager Fanny’s wealthy and charismatic family takes a refugee named Cecile into their home. Fanny becomes fascinated by Cecile’s way of navigating life — and learns that the world she thought she lived in is not at all what it seems. The film insists on seeing things multiple ways and valuing those who bring difference into our lives: both are skills demanded by these treacherous times.

Director Clement Virgo is well known for first-rate adaptations of Canadian novels Brother, by David Chariandy, and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. The evening features a conversation between screenwriter Tamara Berger and producer Damon D’Oliviera.

We are lucky to be able to enjoy a festival of this calibre right here in the County — and in the off season. Passes are on sale now, with tickets coming September 2.