Editor’s note: This interview was originally published ahead of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Sumerian Pictures releases the film in theaters starting Friday, April 17, 2026.
I imagined it as a fun icebreaker. “Hey, Chandler, are you perhaps in the market for a new best friend?” was the vision. What came out to filmmaker Chandler Levack during a recent interview was more like, “Do you need a new friend? Because I loved your film, I felt so seenby it,” almost immediately followed by my throat closing up and my eyes welling in a way that was undeniably obvious, even in a tiny Zoom window.
At least my inclination was right: the “Mile End Kicks” filmmaker got what I was saying. “I’m going to cry,” Levack said in her first interview for the film. “That means the world to me. That really, really does.”
It’s only fitting that Levack’s film would stir big emotions in both its maker and its audience. Much like her debut, “I Like Movies,” “Mile End Kicks” is based on her own experiences. (Also like her first film, “Mile End Kicks” celebrated its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival; it played on opening night of the 2025 festival.) Set in 2011, the film follows budding music critic Grace (Barbie Ferreira) as she embarks on a summer in Montreal. She’s hoping to meet and write about rising bands in the city’s vibrant music scene, while also working on a bigger project very close to her heart.
Along the way, she deals with life, love (including a pair of paramours from the same band), professional disappointments, and the fallout of a horrible experience from her past. Part rom-com, part coming-of-age tale, the film is bright and funny and sexy and sad, the sort of thing that could only be made by someone who lived through so much of what her heroine encounters. As someone who started her own career in a field of criticism dominated by men around the same time as Levack, I felt seen by this film (a term I rarely deploy). Others will too, and some will just have a grand old time with it.
While the film is Levack’s second, she wrote the script for “Mile End Kicks” before she made “I Like Movies.” “I wrote this a decade ago when I was 27, and only maybe three or four years removed from the experiences that I’m talking about in the film,” she said. “At that time, I felt like I just kind of had never written anything that actually felt like me. I had made a lot of music videos and I’d made a short film, but I was like, OK, I’m going to spend a month and I’m going to write this screenplay.”
Levack didn’t initially expect to direct the film, but around 2018, she got serious about her filmmaking — and, specifically, about directing this one. “And it was just kind of impossible,” she said. “I couldn’t get actresses to read the script. At the time, it felt like I was going to have to try to make it for under a million dollars. For such a music movie, it wouldn’t have really been possible. I would’ve had to shoot it in Ontario in Hamilton, pretending that it was Montreal.”
Her producer Matt Miller suggested she make a film for Telefilm’s Talent to Watch, a Canadian program designed for microbudget films. His advice? “Make something small that you could shoot for $200,000 and then when that movie’s a big hit, reach out and then we’ll make this for real.”
Levack laughed remembering Miller’s idea. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, now I have to make a whole other movie. What are you talking about?,’” she said. “I was really mad. But that anger fueled me. I think it helped me sort of start again with a blank slate and really think about something that I wanted to make, to almost treat that film like a film school where I would learn how to work with actors and discover my sensibility.”
After “I Like Movies,” which is loosely based on Levack’s own experiences working in a video rental store, premiered in 2022, Levack went back to her first script (fun aside: the film was originally titled “Anglophone,” until Levack was told, “that no one in America would know what that meant and wouldn’t want to watch it”). “I was struck by just how resonant it still felt to me,” the filmmaker said. “And [now] I wasn’t someone who’s only three or four years divorced from the source material trying to shoot the movie, I was someone who’s now spent a decade [away from it] and has a lot more perspective on it.”
Levack is eager to talk about outside inspirations for the film — she’s even got a public Letterboxd list of them. “I love romantic comedies, they’re my favorite kinds of movies,” she said. “So it’s movies like ‘Broadcast News’ and ‘The Apartment’ and ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ but it’s also all of the Eric Rohmer summer movies, ‘Summer’s Tale’ and ‘La Collectionneuse’ and ‘Le Rayon vert.’ Certainly [Richard] Linklater is a big influence, all the ‘Before’ trilogy and ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’ is a movie I love. Millennial pseudo mumblecore cinema, like ‘Frances Ha.’ ‘Girls,’ I rewatched the whole season again and had all these screen grabs that I
Source: indiewire.com