What does this say about Canadians?

I was in my favourite video store today, getting a few flicks for my vacation, when I noticed something really odd. I don't know what to make of it.

There I was browsing through the Foreign section when I noticed a recent release by a well-known Quebec film-maker. Okay, it was in French, so maybe that qualified it as "foreign" to the young staff of the local outlet. No big deal.

But wait! A shelf away there's another Canadian film. This one is in English, and it's by one of the leading lights of the Canadian movie industry. Good lord, you would have to have missed the entire broohaha around this year's Cannes awards to be ignorant of the fact that this guy, and this film, is definitely a home brew.

Move another shelf and...my goodness, there's another one. Perhaps less notorious, but still...I mean, it stars Sarah Polley! I've watched it. It's so Canadian, it makes your teeth ache. What is it doing in the "We're Foreign!" section?

And then, omigosh, there's another one. Okay, this one is about Afghanistan, but the film-maker is very definitely from Toronto. I confess I haven't seen the movie yet, but I believe it's about the impressions of an ex-pat returning to her homeland after years abroad in Canada. That's Canada, folks. Not foreign.

So what the heck is going on here?

I could understand if my local video store was one of those gargantuan American chains that thinks anything made outside Hollywood is foreign, but that's not the case here. The store is run by the same guys who probably pipe the cable into your house, if you live in the Greater Toronto Area. The name on the store is an icon of Canadian broadcasting. It's just not possible to get more Canadian, or at least more Toronto, that the people who run my local video store.

So why are they classifying home-grown films as foreign? Why do they share the thinking of those big Texas outfits that anything not American is obviously foreign? Why are they relegating our best and our brightest to an itsy-bitsy foreign section in the corner of the store mixed in with flyblown offerings from Mexico and Portugal?

What does this say about us?

I really don't know what to think about this. Pretty sad, though. Pretty sad.