Canada, Guest of Honour at FBM2020

Canada will take centre stage in Germany as official Guest of Honour at the 2020 Frankfurt Book Fair, so get ready to soak up our diverse and vibrant literature, culture, and history — as well as the chance to create new cultural and business opportunities for homegrown talent and international partners! Our official collaboration is known as Canada FBM2020, and the Fair is coming up October 14 to 18, 2020.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is an annual event that reels in some 300,000 attendees. Each year, a different country takes the spotlight and brings audiences into its culture, leading up to, and during the fair itself. Stay tuned for details about all the activities, events, and cultural programming we’ve got planned!

Canada Now: The Maple Movies Festival

As we gear up for the FBM, we’re launching our presence in Germany in a big way! The ninth edition of Canada Now: The Maple Movies Festival, will kick off in Frankfurt on October 20, right up with Canada named Guest of Honour at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, when Norway (this year’s Guest of Honour) passes the torch our way October 20, 2019. Through this selection of features and shorts from both emerging and iconic directors, this initiative will share some of our audiovisual industry’s best films; showcase diverse Canadian voices and stories, and help make Canadian films accessible to German audiences.

The initiative kicks off in Frankfurt at the Deutsches Filmmuseum with a VIP screening of Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour and opening night festivities with guests including the Canadian delegation at Frankfurt 2019, Canadian artists and filmmakers such as Egoyan and Patricia Rozema, as well as German dignitaries and partners. Then, this traveling film festival will hit the road to more than 12 German cities!

The lineup

• Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
• Mina Shum’s Meditation Park
• Patricia Rozema’s Mouthpiece
• Sébastien Pilote’s La disparition des lucioles (The Fireflies are Gone)
• Luc Picard’s Les rois mongols (Cross My Heart )
• Miranda de Pencier’s The Grizzlies

Short films

• Indigenous programme curated by Jason Ryle, Artistic Director of ImagineNATIVE

Classics

• Michel Brault’s Entre la mer et l’eau douce
• Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing