The Next Wave

Phoebe Kut and Hollie Lo in Eve & the Fire Horse. Photo Bob Akester. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Despite the never-ending battle for funding and audiences, it’s a good time for Canadian film. Witness the box office success of Water and C.R.A.Z.Y. (both Genie best picture nominees) and the critical acclaim for A History of Violence, not to mention the buzzed about premiere of Eve & the Fire Horse at the Sundance Film Festival. And at the Genie Awards, the Canadian film industry will honour the best of the past year. But we wanted to find out what’s coming up next. CBC.ca spoke with a half-dozen industry insiders and asked them to predict the people, themes, regions and issues to watch out for in the future.

The Up-and-Comers
It’s an embarrassment of riches: Steve Gravestock, associate director of Canadian programming at the Toronto International Film Festival, says that there is “far too much emerging talent to single out just a few people.” But names that do come up again and again include Michael Dowse (FUBAR, It’s All Gone Pete Tong) for what Gravestock calls his “sensational, boundary-pushing work,” as well as Aubrey Nealon, whose debut feature A Simple Curve premiered last year. David Ostry, a former film editor (New Waterford Girl) turned director, is up for a Genie for his short film Milo 55160; and he’s just directed his first feature, an American indie, for actor Kevin Spacey’s production company. Another film vet testing her directing chops is actress Sarah Polley — she’s about to begin shooting her first feature film, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent. Polley also wrote the screenplay, which is not unusual in this country of auteurs. Karen Walton is one of the rare few who works solely as a screenwriter (Ginger Snaps, CBC-TV’s The Many Trials of Jane Doe). She’s collaborating on a script called Billy Grimm with wunderkind director Brad Peyton for Sony/Columbia Pictures. As for actors, one of Canada’s most talked out talents is 10-year-old Samantha Weinstein (Siblings), who just nabbed an ACTRA award for her performance in the short film Big Girl.

Vive Quebec
Film critic and programmer Jesse Wente calls Quebec “a film industry unto itself. Quebecers see Quebec films. Filmmakers there just don’t have the same survival issues as elsewhere in Canada.” Long a hotbed of Canadian film, the province will continue to sizzle. Jean-Marc Vallée’s hit C.R.A.Z.Y. leads the Genies in nominations this year and the director is only just getting known outside Quebec. Work coming from emerging directors is a happy mix of both popular cinema (Louise Archambault’s gorgeous and lively Familia) and arthouse (Denis Côté’s intensely moody Les États Nordiques). According to Hussain Amarshi, the president of Mongrel Media, an independent film distributor, Quebec film “has a sense of place and a distinct politic and humour, but still has universal appeal. It’s something that English Canadian filmmakers should look to for inspiration.”

Leah Angutimarik in The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Photo Norman Cohn.

Native Films
Aboriginal directors are poised to become a force in Canadian film, Wente predicts. “There’s both opportunity, due to separate funding for aboriginal artists, as well as an upcoming generation of kids with a real interest in film.” Métis director Gail Maurice had her short film Smudge premiere at Sundance earlier this year; “I’d love to see what she could do in a feature,” Wente says. And the Toronto International Film Festival has just announced that acclaimed Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat The Fast Runner) will open the festival this year with his eagerly awaited second feature The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, an epic story about one of the last great Inuit shamans.

West Coast
For a province with a short filmmaking history, some of the most exciting work is coming out of British Columbia. “It wasn’t until the 1990s that west coast directors like Lynn Stopkewich, Mina Shum and Bruce Sweeney put B.C. on the filmmaking map,” says Stacey Donen, a programmer of Canadian films for the Toronto International Film Festival. “The small community, the distance from Toronto, the minimal funding, all of that has created a really strong bond between filmmakers there, and sparked a lot of artistic energy.” Among B.C.’s brightest young talents are Julia Kwan (Eve & the Fire Horse) and A Simple Curve’s Aubrey Nealon.

Global Vision
Kathryn Emslie, director of film and television programs at the Canadian Film Centre, says that “Canadians are much more outward looking and less insular than before and that’s reflected in the new generation of filmmakers.” As the second generation of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean comes into its own, “the whole idea of what constitutes a Canadian film is being called into question,” says Shane Smith, artistic director of the Worldwide Short Film Festival. He points to the success of Deepa Mehta’s Water — a film shot in Hindi and set in India as an example of the increasingly elastic notion of a Canadian story. Two emerging directors with international visions are Ruba Nadda (“a total go-getter,” says Smith), whose recent debut feature Sabah was a cross-cultural love story set in Toronto; and Richie Mehta, an acclaimed Toronto short film director (Amal) who’s currently at work on a feature set in India. “These diverse voices,” adds Amarshi, “could be what establishes Canadian cinema in the long run.”

Genre Bending
Following in the tradition of David Cronenberg, emerging artists will continue to make “genre films that don’t play by the rules,” Gravestock predicts, pointing to Carl Bessai’s eco-zombie film Severed and Rob Stefaniuk’s sci-fi comedy Phil the Alien. Donen adds that Quebec filmmakers are also beginning to move into the “genre territory of sci-fi and horror. And since there’s more money in Quebec than elsewhere, it will be interesting to see what they will do with the effects and talent that they can get with bigger budgets.”

Screen Time
Aside from funding (“there’s never going to be enough money for Canadian film,” Emslie says) one of the biggest problems that Canadian filmmakers have to contend with is the lack of alternative screens. By the time a Canadian film — usually without any budget for advertising — gets some word-of-mouth buzz, it’s already disappeared from the local rep cinema. Smith says that film festivals, with their built-in advantage of providing marketing and promotion for emerging filmmakers, will become even more important in the future. He adds that the federal funding body Telefilm “will have to expand its idea of what counts as viewership. Right now it only considers theatrical releases. But if a thousand people see a film as it makes the festival circuit, why don’t those people count as an audience?” 

Wente says the growing “on-demand culture of downloading, personal video recorders and film sites like youtube.com could be great for Canadian film,” allowing low-budget filmmakers to sidestep funders and distributors by making their work available on the internet for a small fee. Amarshi points to the increasing availability of DVDs through new and non-traditional outlets like NetFlix, Starbucks and Amazon as a way for Canadian films to have life after theatrical release. But he notes that, “filmmakers do have to get over their sense of entitlement. Not every film warrants a release just because it’s Canadian. Quality is the biggest factor for success. If a film is good, then nothing can stop it.”

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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