I saw this film recently at the Cork Film Festival and really enjoyed it. Director/writer David Bezmozgis takes a slightly darker look than usual at the familiar teenage/high school drama.

The story is set in 1988 suburban Toronto and is about Ben, a promising ice hockey player. He meets one of his teammates at a concert and lends him money to buy drugs. His teammate then disappears. Initially he tells nobody what he has done but then finds himself getting closer to the missing boys sister as the authorities search for her brother. We see the effect this has on the basically decent teenager as he wrestles with his conscience. At home his parents are Russian immigrants and speak Russian at home. I believe this is similar to the director's own youth. His mother wants him to keep up his good grades while his father hopes he can get a college hockey scholarship. He also does the usual high school things such as going to parties and playing war games with his nerdy friends.

The acting is pretty good, especially from Jeff Pustil as the missing boys father and Sergiy Kotelenets as the hockey player's father, anxious that his son take the opportunities that he wasted in his own youth. The performance of the younger actors is a bit mixed but Mark Rendall does well in the main role.

Thankfully the film doesn't have a "Hollywood" style neat ending. Definitely a promising film from a young filmmaker.

It's 1988 Toronto. Ben Spektor is a student and a star hockey player. His parents are Russian immigrants. They speak Russian to him while he replies in English. He likes Bob Dylan who is coming to town. There are two girls and two idiot friends. A teammate goes missing after borrowing $5 from him to buy drugs.

The first part is a little slow. When the guy goes missing, the slowness allows a darker moodiness to seep into the movie. I do want better visual cinematography. It's a very bland filmmaking style. It's almost deliberately static but not in a stylized way. When combined with the low key tone, this can get rather flat. It also could use more music especially being such a large part of the story. The kids certainly talk a lot about it. The music that it does have is some lesser songs which is totally expected for a Canadian indie. The budget is what it is. The dream playlist has limitations. As for the young cast, Mark Rendall is not really leading man material but he brings a steadiness to the teen. Holly Deveaux is sweet and one big scene to end the movie. Melanie Leishman is also interesting. This indie has interesting characters in a standard but complex coming-of-age story. There are a few great memorable scenes. Filmmaker David Bezmozgis could do more and add to the material but of course, it is still a Canadian indie and that has limitations.

Films geared to teenagers that authentically mirror their experience are very rare indeed but Victoria Day is definitely one of the few. Shot in North York, Ontario and set during Victoria Day weekend in 1988, Canadian author David Bezmozgis' first feature is the sensitive story of a very private young man learning to cope with problems of the adult world that have been thrust upon him much too soon. The film opens at the hockey rink where Ben Spektor (Mark Rendell), a 16-year-old hockey player, is dodging verbal bullets from teammate Jordan Chapman, a notorious bully. It is the time of the Stanley Cup finals between the Edmonton Oilers (read Wayne Gretzky) and the Boston Bruins, and hockey is the main topic of conversation.

With Bob Dylan song "Dark Eyes" playing in the background, the scene shifts to Exhibition Stadium where Ben and his friends are attending a Bob Dylan concert. Ben is stopped by Jordan outside of the concert who demands that he give him five dollars to buy drugs and Ben reluctantly complies. When Jordan does not show up at school or hockey practice the next day, however, Ben fears the worst. As the days pass and family, friends, and police search for Jordan, Ben's budding relationship with the missing youth's sister Cayla (Holly Deveaux) is strained by his feelings of guilt over Jordan's disappearance.

Although the ongoing search for Jordan hangs heavily, Bezmozgis does not allow its mood to dominate, showing lighter incidents from Ben's experience that define the feeling of time and place, including friends Sammy (John Mavro) and Noah (Scott Beaudin) shooting fireworks at each other at a party, an awkward relationships with the very giving Melanie (Melanie Leishman), Ben's very tentative outreach to Cayla, and his Russian parents (Nataliya Alyexeyenko and Sergiy Kotelenets) gruff over reaction when his broken arm suffered after clowning around prevents him from participating in the hockey playoffs.

Bezmozgis says that the film was inspired by the director's own experience as the son of Russian immigrant parents and also by his recollection of the death of 14-year-old Benji Hayward who drowned in Lake Ontario after ingesting LSD at a Pink Floyd concert in 1988. While Victoria Day is a fictional story, Bezmozgis says that he was happy to find out that Hayward's parents attended a screening at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival and liked the film. Victoria Day may lack the professional polish and dramatic arc of some higher budget films, yet it offers an emotionally affecting slice of life that captures that painful time of transition in a young man's life when, in Bob Dylan's words, "time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies, a million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes."