With a schedule ranging from Citizen Marc, the Marc Emery documentary, to Dark Blood, the film River Phoenix was making when he died, the Whistler Film Festival continues to build on its reputation for offbeat programming.

“At the end of the day, I think there’s a very particular vibe that’s been established over the years, and I’m picking it up and carrying it to the next level, hopefully,” said director of programming Paul Gratton in a call to the Georgia Straight. “And that’s as a kind of hip, younger-skewing film festival.”

He’s certainly throwing down the gauntlet with product like Cheap Thrills, which appears in the festival’s American Indie stream. Called a “thoroughly nasty piece of work” by Variety, the debut film from E.L. Katz promptly incited a bidding war after its debut at South by Southwest earlier this year. Gratton gleefully promises that “you might wanna kill the filmmaker” once it’s over. Bruce McDonald’s latest, The Husband, and Craig Goodwill’s fantastically weird Patch Town, compared by the programmer to the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, are gentler, if no less challenging.

Gratton has also simultaneously veered away from hard-core horror with the festival’s Late Night schedule, bringing in items like Marvin Kren’s The Station—“a creature feature more than a gore movie”, in his words—and Sturla Gunnarsson’s genre film, Ice Soldiers. “If you want some great action in a snow-set location with sci-fi Nazis terrorizing the Canadian north, then this is the one,” he said.

While there’s plenty of room for intriguing international fare like the Chinese blockbuster Finding Mr. Right (from director Xiao Lu Xue) or Barry Avrich’s enthralling portrait of the medallioned Renaissance man behind Penthouse magazine, Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story—smartly paired with the uncut version of Guccione’s maligned epic, Caligula—roughly half of the 42 features getting their roll out in the wintry mountaintop setting are Canadian. And a significant portion of those are local, like the Brent Butt–Carl Bessai collaboration, No Clue, and Teach Grant’s searing and sure-to-be-controversial Downtown Eastside drama, Down Here.

“One of the most gratifying things last year was the number of Canadian films that picked up distribution after playing here,” Gratton said. “I’m thinking of Hit ’n Strum, [which is] Vancouver-based, which actually played Toronto for three weeks at the Eaton Centre. I’m thinking of American Mary, which got picked up by Raven Banner [Entertainment]. I’m thinking of the Sheepdogs movie [The Sheepdogs Have at It] that closed the festival. I like that there’s some industrial activity—that the films don’t just come here, take a bow, and disappear.”

The proof is last year’s winner in the Borsos Competition for Best Canadian Feature, Kate Miles Melville’s Picture Day, which also scored a best-performance nod for Tatiana Maslany. With Variety executive editor Steven Gaydos present at the festival, Maslany subsequently found herself on the industry bible’s list of 10 actors to watch. Twelve months later, she’s a bona fide star with the globally successful TV series Orphan Black. (Look for an interview with Maslany in next week’s Straight.)

“We love her,” said Gratton, who chose to open this year’s WFF with the Jason Priestley–directed Cas & Dylan, in which Maslany is accompanied in a Canadian-set road movie by none other than Richard Dreyfuss. As a “huge fan of American film in the ’70s”, Gratton is naturally pretty excited by the casting. “I’ve loved him ever since [The Apprenticeship of] Duddy Kravitz. To me, that’s his seminal performance,” he said.

Gratton and the rest of the festival’s attendees can feast on the issue of his greatness in the presence of the man himself, as Dreyfuss will be in Whistler to attend a tribute hosted by Variety’s Gaydos. Look for an interview with the legendary star on Straight.com this week.

The 13th annual Whistler Film Festival runs from Wednesday (December 4) to December 8.