Trippy documentary about former Canadian PM Brian Mulroney heading to TIFF
When you think of the late former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, “psychedelic VHS fever dream” is probably not the first thing that comes to mind.
But that’s exactly what’s heading to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year.
A surprising film on TIFF’s 2026 lineup is Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a National Film Board documentary that looks less like your average political biography and more like something you’d stumble across in the ’90s while channel-surfing in your mom’s basement at 2 a.m.
The 105-minute bilingual documentary will make its world premiere at TIFF’s Midnight Madness, a beloved late-night program dedicated to the weirdest, wildest, and most boundary-pushing movies of the year. And if the first look is anything to go by, this one fits right in.
Helmed by Winnipeg director Matthew Rankin, the film is described as a “psychedelic doomscroll through the mind of a master Canadian politician,” incorporating more than 80,000 pieces of archival footage into a kaleidoscopic collage of vibrant visuals, tracing Mulroney’s evolution from the “Boy from Baie-Comeau” to Canada’s 18th prime minister.
National Film Board of Canada
According to the official synopsis, the film follows Mulroney’s political journey after launching what it calls a “charm offensive the likes of which Canada had never seen,” charting how he dismantled the political establishment “one dad joke at a time.”
While he’s not a household name like Cronenberg or Villeneuve just yet, if anyone were to make a genre-bending, mind-melding film about a Canadian politician, it would be Rankin.
For years, Rankin has been making wonderfully weird movies, which he described as “found-footage experiments with weird Winnipeg TV commercials” that “involve some element of collage.” His previous features, The Twentieth Century and Universal Language, have won awards at major festivals including Cannes, Berlin, and TIFF.
Despite spotlighting one of Canada’s most polarizing political figures, Rankin insists the documentary isn’t trying to tell audiences what to think.
“First of all, I want to say that I think Brian Mulroney is completely amazing,” Rankin said in a statement to media.
“From the many thousands of hours of Mulroney-related news footage and propaganda I have sorted through emerges the full televisual force of an astoundingly charismatic and almost vengefully ambitious man, capable of being duplicitous and even ruthless (but hey, that’s politics), uniquely able to dance so effortlessly between Canada’s notoriously parochial two solitudes and, above all, an astonishing, brilliant political genius.”
Rankin was quick to clarify that admiration doesn’t equal endorsement.
“I still would not vote for him. I am not a person of conservative persuasion, but I also dislike ideologically driven films of any sort that try to tell you how to think.”
Mulroney came to power in 1984 with what was then the largest electoral victory in Canadian history and was re-elected four years later. For almost nine years as prime minister, he reshaped Canada’s economy with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, introduced the controversial (at the time) Goods and Services Tax, and faced, as one would expect, a string of political scandals. With his popularity at a low point, he resigned in 1993. Mulroney died in 2024 at the age of 84, and Canadians still debate his legacy today.
And judging by this delightfully trippy new documentary, those debates aren’t ending anytime soon.
TIFF runs from Sept. 10 to 20, 2026 in Toronto, Ont., with the festival’s full schedule set to be released on Aug. 11.