Mettler shot Egoyan's Next of Kin and Family Viewing (1987), Rozema's Passion: A Letter in 16mm (1985), Podeswa's Nion in the Kabaret de La Vita (1986) and McDonald's Knock!
Despite the lack of a defining manifesto, the Toronto-based group existed through a close-knit sense of cooperation of a kind rarely seen in Canada since the growth of Quebec cinema in the early sixties.
[9] In the same year, Montreal's Festival du Nouveau Cinéma famously concluded with Wim Wenders publicly reassigning the first-place prize money from his Wings of Desire to Egoyan, whose Speaking Parts had received a special mention.
A number of key New Wave films followed in the wake this stunning successes: Egoyan's The Adjuster (1991) and Exotica (which won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 1994); McDonald's Roadkill (1989) and Highway 61 (1991), both written by and starring McKellar; Greyson's Zero Patience (1994); and Mettler's The Top of His Head (1989) and Tectonic Plates (1992).
[10] In 1992, Geoff Pevere wrote a piece for retrospective of Canadian cinema that took place at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris (“Middle of Nowhere: Ontario Movies after 1980,” which was reprinted in Post Script in 1995).
Cameron Bailey explored this notion deeper in an article for a Special Issue of Take One: Film in Canada, Summer 2000 (devoted to the history of filmmaking in Ontario) entitled “Standing in the Kitchen All Night: A Secret History of the Toronto New Wave,”[11] and later, Bailey's article was the basis for Brenda Longfellow's article (published in Toronto on Film): “Surfacing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-Nationalism.”[12] Far from representing the culmination of Ontario's seemly long-standing attempts at establishing itself as a viable production centre for big-budget commercial features made in North America, the most important films from the 1980s and early 1990s represented a reaction to and a break from this commercial model.