Mary Walsh, Sarah Polley films featured in Atlantic film festival

Mary Walsh's new movie Young Triffie's Been Made Away With and Sarah Polley's film based on an Alice Munro story, Away from Her, are among the galas atthe 26th Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.

The festival, scheduled for Sept. 14-23, announced a lineup of 223 films on Wednesday.

Walsh, formerly of This Hour Has 22 Minutes and now Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, turns her comic genius to a Newfoundland murder mystery in Young Triffie's Been Made Away With.

The film, starring Rmy Girard, Andrea Martin and Colin Mochrie, follows a gormless young ranger investigating the murder of a young woman who washes up on a Newfoundland beach in 1946.

Away from Her is Polley's directorial debut and stars Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent in a script based on the Munro story, The Bear Came over the Mountain. It premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival before coming to Halifax.

Missing from the lineup is the much-anticipated Trailer Park Boys movie.

The film, based on the locally producedtelevision series, was shot last year and is due in theatres Oct. 6.

Festival director Lia Renaldo said all parties tried hard to include the film.

"We worked with the distributor and the local producers for about three to four weeks trying to put this large-scale event together that would work within their time frame for releasing the film and our time frame but in the end, our logistics just didn't match up," she said.

One of the last great shamans

The opening movie for the Atlantic festival is The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the highly anticipated new movie from Zacharias Kunuk, director of Atanarjuat The Fast Runner.

The story of one of the last great shamans of the Canadian North is based on the journals of a Danish explorer. It also screens in Toronto later this week.

The Atlantic Film Festival closeson Sept. 23 with After the Wedding, from the Danish director Susanne Bier.

After the Wedding tells the story of Jacob, who travels from India to Denmark after he receives an unusualoffer that will help him save his orphanage.

The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang, a comedy by Tim Skousen about a group of friends following some mysterious footprints in search of a sasquatch, gets its Canadian premiere in Halifax.

Also on the lineup of galas and special presentations:

• Dlivrez-Moi, a film from Denis Chouinard about a woman trying to rebuild relations with her daughter after being imprisoned for killing her lover.
• Snow Cake, a Canadian-British production that premiered in Berlin earlier this year about an autistic woman played by Sigourney Weaver who befriends a lonely man played by Alan Rickman.
• Strangers with Candy, a film about an unlikely stripper, which is already playing in cinemas.
• Congorama, Philippe Falardeau's film about an inventor who travels to Quebec looking for his family.
• Brothers of the Head, a film about Siamese twins on a quest for rock'n' roll fame.