This year’s County Adaptation Film Festival opens with Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck. It’s based on a story by Stephen King, but it is not a horror movie so much as an apocalyptic one, built around the life of an accountant at the end of the world.

Time, of course, is of the essence. Always short, it’s now running out. Like all good sci-fi, the film jars the viewer into recognizing the familiar in the strange. In the opening sequence, every TV set — computers are no longer working; the internet is gone for good — shows vivid news footage of massive wildfires and devastating floods. The latest species extinctions are announced in voiceovers. A huge chunk of California falls into the Pacific as we watch.

The natural world is collapsing. The familiar is the strange, the one hopeful note the death of the internet.

This is, paradoxically, what you might call a “town square” film, like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. It participates in the tradition of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. It does not take community for granted, as a backdrop, something to be left behind as the hero sets out on a quest for self discovery, or romance. It insists on the importance of collaborative, conversational civic life; the central character is here to tell us how much we need everyone else.  

It is, in short, a superb choice of opener for a film festival with big ambitions that takes place in a small town. It’s all ages and family friendly, in the way of a Spielberg film. In the absence of the internet, and in the face of global catastrophe, it insists people come together.

Bonjour Tristesse is another standout, one that questions the assumptions of The Life of Chuck. The accomplishment of this festival is in the ways its films and stories and special guests promise to speak to one another about our moment. 

Where Chuck’s insistence on community might be seen as just aggressively American, this film, an adaptation of Francoise Sagan’s 1954 novel — written when she was just 18, it was an instant sensation — takes up a distinctively European tradition of introspection, intimacy, and betrayal. Set in France on a gorgeous, sunwashed Mediterranean seacoast — another version of the edge of the world — it is not just uninterested in the idea of the common good, it is opposed to it.

Acting for the good of the whole requires the ability to put others before the self, to experience other people as a crucial dimension of one’s inner life. That recognition demands a moral maturity that neither teenaged Cecile nor her indulgent father possess. Cecile has had her father to herself since her mother died when she was a young girl, and she will not only brook no competition, she will not grow up. When her father falls in love with a compelling other woman, Cecile sets a plot in motion to get rid of her. That plot’s success, however, depends on every character’s tendency to act against their own best interests.

At its heart, this year’s CAFF might be said to be considering Canada’s developing moral maturity, and the leadership it is assuming in a world on the brink of apocalyptic change. It features a diverse cast of Canadian writers and directors. Tamara Faith Berger and Clement Virago’s Steal Away, just off its world premiere at TIFF, closes the festival on Sunday night. It adapts Canadian historian Karolyn Smardz Frost’s account of slavery in antebellum Kentucky into another sci fi, one that straddles the territory of The Life of Chuck and Bonjour Tristesse to suggest a Canadian reinvention of the major film traditions.

The story refracts the world historical legacy of slavery into its modern counterpart, migration. It suggests that geography might be destiny — a mythical “North” represents freedom to desperate migrants — in a way that revives a tired trope for a challenging present — where it just might be true.

The centerpiece of the festival is a screening of writer and director Sarah Polley’s Away from Her, followed by a conversation with Polley herself on the stage at The Regent Saturday night. Polley’s quiet and radiant small town film highlights both the grace required to put another ahead of oneself — and the grace to which it leads.

There are many riches in store at the County’s film festival. I recommend the purchase of the well-priced Festival Pass: at $75 it’s a bargain. The program is worth attending to in its entirety. It has been carefully assembled, and the special guests and conversations studded throughout the screenings promise to bring it all to thoughtful life.