By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 13, 1997; Page D03

There is not much identifiably Canadian about director Atom Egoyan's new film, "The Sweet Hereafter."

There is snow, and a frozen lake into which a school bus crashes. But that's a scene originally set in Upstate New York by the American author of the book, Russell Banks. The film's basic premise, in fact, depends on an American notion: An ambulance-chasing lawyer arrives, representing bereaved families for a portion of whatever award he wins in court, a fee arrangement that is illegal in almost all of Canada.

The same can be said of Winnipeg director Guy Maddin's new film, "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs," a love fantasy set on a mythical island; or "Kitchen Party," a suburban-decay comedy as translatable to the tract houses of Northern Virginia as it is to Vancouver. There are touches of Nova Scotia – step-dancing, fiddle music and boats – in Thom Fitzgerald's "The Hanging Garden," but the theme of growing up gay with an abusive father is hardly peculiar, or central, to the Canadian identity. And anyway, Fitzgerald is American, born and reared in New Jersey, with dual citizenship since college.

Three decades into its efforts to build a domestic film industry with a patchwork of tax credits, grants, subsidies and public investment, Canada finally has the national cinema it craved as an antidote to the "cultural imperialism" of Hollywood. And for the most part, it turns out, it has little to do with Canada as such, the dramatization of its history, or the exploration of its national values, mores and attitudes.

It is a phenomenon that is being both recognized and accepted among those in the film industry here, who feel moviemaking north of the border has developed its own, unexpected logic, not mimicking the American blockbuster ethic, but finding a path distinct from it.

"Canadian film," it turns out, isn't so much about Canada as a nation as it is about the idiosyncratic visions of the people who make movies here – "meditations on identity," as Egoyan puts it.

The country has yet to produce a director who dramatizes the nation's past or defines its generations; there have been no big-sweep films that tackle the country's seminal moments or grapple with its touchiest contemporary issues.

What it has produced is a near glut of provocative, engaging and very personalized movies – so many and, for a few years now, so consistently, that directors and others say Canada's traditional preoccupation with competing against Hollywood is giving way to a more mature recognition of what filmmaking can be here.

The results have been funny, weird, dramatic and kinky: Last year's top Canadian films included car-wreck fetishists and necrophiliacs. They are culturally diverse – a Montreal director's take on Asian private-school girls at the fringes of the sex trade – and more often than not worth watching.

Perhaps there is a Canadian sensibility, after all.

"We have the privilege of being able to challenge conventions and get the films made. We don't have to respond to market pressures," in part because of government and tax credit financing, Egoyan says. "These are films from a different place – trying to probe notions of identity and culture," but from a quieter perspective than the din coming from south of the border.

"We spent 20 years trying to make Hollywood movies," says Fitzgerald, "and now we are looking more inward."

Necrophiliacs and car wrecks may not be what the country's cultural bureaucracy had in mind in the 1960s, when Telefilm Canada was established to provide public equity financing for home-grown movies. The idea then was to battle Hollywood, and add "Canadian content" to the ocean of U.S.-made images Canadians were watching.

"Everywhere else in the world there was a mature cinema – France, Italy, India," says Peter Pearson, a Montreal director and producer and former Telefilm Canada director. "In Canada, it just had not happened."

Over time, government support expanded and moviemaking in Canada has become economically important, accounting for about $1 billion a year in investment.

The content issue is another story. At its most absurd, in the 1970s, Canadian taxpayers were underwriting the production of dozens of schlock B-movies each year, as projects were designed around generous tax shelters.

And there remains frustration that Canada has yet to produce a "breakthrough" film – a bona fide, and identifiably Canadian, continental hit.

Plenty of Canadians have made popular movies: Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters," for example, Jim Cameron's "Terminator" films or several of Norman Jewison's works. But they are considered, rightly, to be Hollywood products, part of the cabal that, so it is argued, still dominates Canadian screens and minds with $50 million marketing budgets that fill the local department store windows with stuffed Dalmatian puppies.

"We'll never be able to compete with that," Fitzgerald says.

Instead, filmmakers here have pursued a more intimate type of filmmaking, one that does not draw on national myths or big symbols to be effective. They are winning international awards for it – including two top prizes at the Cannes film festival in the past two years.

"If the argument is that it's Canadian if it has a Group of 7 pine tree and someone lying on a rock – hell, we're over that," says David MacIntosh, director of Canadian programming for the Toronto International Film Festival. "What we are attempting to do is create an environment where people are seen as creating their own culture. The more we do that, the less we have to worry about the utterly tired notion of what Canada is or isn't."