Last year, the Whistler Film Festival gave movie buffs the West Coast premiere of Todd Haynes’s Carol. The year before that, we were treated to a preview of Julianne Moore’s Academy Award–winning turn in Still Alice. These are hardly minor films.

“We essentially seem to be carving out a two-armed bandit here for a little five-day festival,” says programmer Paul Gratton, in a call to the Straight from Toronto. “On the right arm, we’re doing better and better all the time with what I call the high-profile Oscar-bait movies.”

It’s certainly hard to imagine a film with a higher profile right now than La La Land. Starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, director Damien Chazelle’s love letter to the golden age of the Hollywood musical stole everybody’s heart earlier this year at TIFF—including Gratton’s. “I said, ‘That’s the one I want,’ ” he recalls. And then he made it happen. La La Land will open the high-altitude fest when Whistler swings into action with its first gala screening on Wednesday (November 30), a good two weeks before the film goes on general release.

No less impressive are the other titles Gratton has lined up for Whistler’s “right arm”, including Ben Wheatley’s hyperviolent TIFF favourite, Free Fire; the much-touted Lion, starring Rooney Mara and Dev Patel (Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein went on a bro date for its premiere in New York last week); and two major Canadian premieres in the shape of Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women—featuring a buzzed-about career-best performance by Annette Bening—and the Jessica Chastain vehicle Miss Sloane, directed by John Madden, who happens to be visiting the WFF for a master class and Q&A.

“The right arm is doing well,” reaffirms Gratton, with undue modesty. “And then the left arm is really our support for emerging filmmakers, and this year we’ve got 15 films directed by first-time feature filmmakers. Out of 48 movies, that’s pretty considerable. Not to mention 15 films directed by women. That’s the second tranche of programming, and it also gets better all the time.”

Chief among the titles here is Anatomy of Violence, Deepa Mehta’s take on the gang rape and subsequent death of a young student in Delhi, an event that galvanized the entire globe. Digging deeper into Gratton’s program yields a feast of potential winners that might otherwise go unnoticed, including Chloé Leriche’s Before the Streets, the first film to be shot entirely in the Atikamekw language; Justin McConnell’s gritty one-take wonder Red Mile; and the latest no-budget tribute to ’80s horror from Winnipeg’s brilliant Astron-6 collective, The Void—which was just picked up for U.S. distribution, Gratton delightedly reveals, “in the last couple of days”.

“I think the distributors have also discovered that we’re all about marketing,” offers Gratton, who predicts that we’ll be hearing about a few more deals as the festival proceeds. “We’re very much about positioning the films for theatrical releases or having emerging filmmakers hook up with distributors and explore alternate approaches to the marketplace—which is what a lot of our industry panels are about.”

In that case, let’s keep our fingers crossed for the Newfoundland feature Hunting Pignut, which marries a rising star, Kelowna’s Taylor Hickson, with a first-time writer-director, Martine Blue, in a poignant, if raw, story based on Blue’s experiences as a homeless gutter punk. It feels like the kind of film Whistler is particularly apt at bringing to the surface.

The 18-year-old Hickson turned a lot of heads when she showed up in Deadpool earlier this year, but Pignut offered the young rookie a friendlier-than-normal entrée into the mysteries of filmmaking. “The Hollywood style can be very cold and technical,” she tells the Straight in a separate call from Winnipeg, but Blue’s set was anything but. Hickson describes a particularly emotional scene between her and her screen mother, played by Amelia Manuel. Director Blue was so moved that she couldn’t call “Cut.”

“She had tears streaming down her face and she came over and she held me for 10 minutes,” Hickson says. “She said, ‘I just watched myself with my mother. You have no idea what that means to me.’ We just sat there and cried together. I will never forget that. Those are things you carry with you. That’s what made it very special to me.”

There are, of course, a handful of films that are designed to provoke less sublime emotions among Whistler audiences. If Gratton’s preferred metaphor is a two-armed film festival, may we humbly suggest that a film as violent, gory, and generally offensive as Middle Man—walkouts are guaranteed—constitutes its balls. The programmer laughs. “I thought we’d really hit an apex last year when we ran Gaspar Noé’s Love in 3-D,” he says, referring to a film that attempted to spice hard-core porn with gratuitous art. “Not all small towns would be so tolerant.”

On the other hand—or arm, bringing us up to three now, plus some balls—Whistler is no ordinary small town. “Out of our 48 features, only seven played TIFF. We’re establishing ourselves as having a very distinct and, I like to think, important niche inside the Canadian festival environment,” Gratton says, homing in on the kind of flavour the WFF is ever more successfully striving for. “A lot of it has to do with timing. We’re the last major festival of the season. But a lot of it has to do with location, and the physical beauty of Whistler. Many of the great film festivals of the world, if you look at Telluride or Cannes or Sundance…” The programmer is laughing again, as he anticipates climbing onto a plane later in the week and leaving behind the endless brown slush of Hogtown for a crisp, West Coast Shangri-la. “These are not ugly locations!”

The Whistler Film Festival takes place from Wednesday (November 30) to December 5. More information is at whistlerfilmfestival.com/.