Where is Canada going? Well, that depends on where it's been. Both ends of that time line are pondered in considerable detail by a pair of films opening this Friday (May 26).

Sometimes things are defined by what they're not, and Canada is definitely not the United States. For perhaps the first time in more than a century, that is widely perceived as being a good thing. Since this country really started pushing in its own direction in the 1970s, it has gradually been building a kind of pleasant orneriness that the world has been slow to comprehend””perhaps because we rarely ask to be celebrated, but also because, well, fuck it!

That's the tone of Escape to Canada, which also coincides with the close of DOXA, the Documentary Film & Video Festival. In fact, it wraps the event with a gala screening at 7 p.m. Sunday (May 28) at the Granville 7.

This loose-limbed feature is from the writer-director Albert Nerenberg, who had a cult hit three years ago with Stupidity, a frank look at the Bush era from the gutter up. Here, he contemplates events shifting the notion of freedom northward, from the putative democracy on our border to a place formerly famous for being politely uptight.

“Back in 2003,”  he said in a call from his Toronto home, “I noticed that there were all these things happening at once. First there was the rush to gay marriage, then they moved to decriminalize marijuana. And when the government made it clear that we would not be participating in the Iraq adventure, I realized we were having our very own summer of love.” 

In Hamilton and a few other places, screenings have been shut down due to a fog of pot smoke in the air.

“I guess some people take the notion of liberty a little too far,”  Nerenberg added with a chuckle. “But they are responding to the same things people are seeing when we show it in the States. I mean, people are saying to us afterwards, 'Hey, I thought we were supposed to be the land of the free.' In that sense, it seems to be a wake-up call for Americans, and also for Canadians, since we tend to judge ourselves in relation to our neighbours.” 

For Nerenberg, who will be in town for his DOXA screening (he's shooting a new project assertively called We Hate Toronto), Escape is at least a hint of things to come.

“Even if it's just a stab at capturing what's been happening lately, the film shows us in a different light. Among young people, the old self-effacement is starting to wane, and Canadians are starting to be proud of their uniqueness””not too proud, of course, because ostentatious pride is an American thing.” 

Coincidentally, Souvenir of Canada, a documentary feature also opening theatrically on Friday, has been timed to coincide with a new book from its principal architect, Douglas Coupland. It's also a follow-up to two volumes of the same name by the author, detailing an obsessive collection of artifacts from his West Vancouver childhood. He gathered his net floats, beer cans, and kitschy mementos from the 1967 Expo in Montreal and packed them into a white-painted “CMHC”  house in the burbs for a one-off cultural installation.

Coupland talked to the Straight at the Granville Island campus of his alma mater, Emily Carr Institute, in a nondescript first-floor classroom, where he sat picking most of the vegetables out of a vegetarian wrap. In general, he chooses his words even more cautiously, perhaps to help rein in a famously discursive mind.

“I spent two years in this room,”  said the popular author, contemplating a time before generations had letters attached to them. Back then, there was an Ur–Canadian childhood in which things seemed much more etched in stone than they would appear to young people today.

“I remember the projectors and the hardware we used to have in school. Even when we first had computers, they seemed archaic, like they'd always been around. For a long time, everything looked the same, but maybe that all changed with versions””you know, version 2.0 and all that. Suddenly we were reminded that things were changing and would keep changing.” 

A sense of heightened temporality suffuses Coupland's work and, especially, Souvenir, a film directed by Robin Neinstein, who flew out from Toronto and showed up in the same meeting room.

“It was a hopeless task,”  Neinstein said cheerfully, “to try to capture all of Doug's ideas in a film like this. Naturally, we shot enough material to fill several movies, and the DVD will have lots of extras””particularly old footage from the CBC that is fascinating but never found a home in the picture.” 

Both the writer and director were notably struck by the absurdity of much of that footage, which Coupland refers to in the film as “Soviet-style propaganda” . But both were also tickled by the innocence of this country's ongoing attempts at self-improvement. In fact, you come away from both movies with a somewhat surprising revelation: Canada is actually a funny, unfinished kind of place.