By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

The directorial debut of Tamil Canadian filmmaker V.T. Nayani, This Place (which premiered at last year’s TIFF) is a queer love story between two young women from different backgrounds that finds its strengths in being so culturally specific to Toronto.

Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Nayani) is a mix of Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) and Iranian heritage, who moved to Toronto from her reserve near Montreal to attend school in the city.

Malai (Priya Guns) is a Tamil Canadian whose family fled the Sri Lankan Civil War, who lives with her older brother Ahrun (Alex Joseph) in Toronto. Kawenniióhstha and Malai have a “meet cute” over a lost diary at a laundromat, but they bond over their shared desires to reconnect with their cultural roots, and complicated relationships with their families.

We can see some evidence of this being Nayani’s first feature, with a few more amateurish elements throughout; the dialogue does sound somewhat stilted at times, especially in a few of the early scenes between Kawenniióhstha and Malai, and some of the film’s medium closeup framing choices are a bit bland. But Nayani does stage a number of poignant scenes as the film goes along, built around themes of identity and finding your own place in a melting pot culture like Toronto.

Nayani delivers a handful of emotionally resonant moments (like a sweet moment between brother and sister in the car), with her film having a strong sense of the cultural identities of its characters. At one point, another character muses that it “only happens here” when hearing about the ethnic makeup of the central couple. And it’s this only-in-Toronto angle, captured by Nayani and Jacobs through their writing, that makes This Place a mostly satisfying love story.

This Place is opening exclusively in limited release on July 7th, and will be available across Canada on VOD/Digital platforms as of August 15th. It’s being distributed in Canada by Vortex Media.