A scene from the made-in-Yellowknife feature Versus Ivan. Courtesy Versus Ivan Incorporated
Tinseltown it ain’t – but in the piney, Precambrian vastness of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife may be Hollywood Far North. Here, filmmaking has blossomed like an arctic flower: small in scale, yet vivid and intense. And like such a flower, it’s in perpetual danger of fading – fast.
Movie-wise, this mining camp-cum-bureaucratic boomtown has been on a relative tear, says Paul Gordon, who until recently ran Yellowknife’s Western Arctic Moving Picture cooperative. In the past two years WAMP has cheered the debut of several local productions, including the city’s first homegrown feature-length narrative and a pair of documentaries that grabbed international attention – one airing on American public television, the other netting accolades on the Canadian film-fest circuit.
The latter was Gordon’s own Baghdad or Bust. Winner of Best Documentary honours at the 2003 Whistler Film Festival, Baghdad is a funny, poignant piss-take on the war in Iraq, chronicling the misadventures of Gordon and two fellow Yellowknifers, director Matt Frame and cameraman Adam Bowick, as they meander through the Middle East during the U.S. invasion, interviewing such stranger-than-fictional characters as a piratical Kurd and a Turkish rug-monger with a cat named Bush.
The chance to make flicks like Baghdad is a blessing bestowed by the North, says Gordon, soft-spoken, pony-tailed and 30. He found his way to Yellowknife six years ago, having graduated from Ryerson’s film program but seeing few opportunities for advancement in the south. “If I’d stuck around Toronto,” he says, “it might have been a decade before I would have become second camera.” In the N.W.T., he slipped to the front of the filmmaking line.
Chris Gamble did the same – and he didn’t even have to relocate. The 24-year-old was born in Yellowknife and grew up using his parents’ 8-mm Canon to shoot mock TV shows under the midnight sun. Last December – having graduated from Queen’s University’s stage-and-screen program and with a few short films and documentaries under his belt – he debuted Versus Ivan, his hometown’s first feature-length narrative.
The opening scene of Versus Ivan, shot on Great Slave Lake, NWT. Courtesy Versus Ivan Incorporated
An off-beat, bare-budget coming-of-age tale, Ivan follows the psychological meltdown of Ivan Schulloppses, a hapless and hidebound twentysomething whose precious routine goes awry when his daily meals-by-mail inexplicably stop arriving. Despite overwrought acting and a tone that swings between maudlin and self-consciously silly, Ivan is enriched by flashes of ingenious writing, a supercool soundtrack and stylish cinematography. Given that this flick was cobbled together with $90,000, one has to wonder what Gamble has up his sleeve next. He’s not saying – focusing instead on tweaking Ivan in preparation for submitting it to film festivals. But whatever’s next, he notes, he wants to shoot it in his hometown.
The foremost advantage of filming up here, according to both Gamble and Gordon, is the gusto of the locals. Yellowknife’s 18,000 townsfolk, hemmed in by wilderness at the end of a lonely highway, are hungry for fun. When a film project arises, they’ll build dollies, paint props, play extras – and beg for more. “There’s such a great support system,” Gamble says. “The city’s not that big, so more people have a vested interest in your film, because they know people in it or they just really want it to succeed.”
Another advantage is the backdrop: the stark boreal landscape, the dry skies and the perpetually low-slung sun – which all make for dreamy shooting. The downside, of course, is that in the depths of February, conditions are cryogenic. It’s hard to operate a camera wearing beaver-hide gauntlets. And after a while, warming batteries in your armpits gets tired.
But there’s a bigger downside: dollars. Though the local Dogrib call Yellowknife "Somba K’e" – place of money – that’s really only the case for diamond miners, developers, politicos and their ilk. For filmmakers, it’s just not so. France Benoit knows this better than anyone. An ex-career bureaucrat with the territorial government, Benoit turned to full-time filmmaking three years ago, directing and producing Alicia and the Mystery Box, a documentary about her bid to return a long-lost box of heirlooms to its owner, an elderly Cuban exile. Paid for largely out of pocket, the film aired on CBC and was picked up by a U.S. public broadcasting affiliate in South Florida, where so many Cubans live.
Buoyed by her rookie success, Benoit hatched plans for a second film – a documentary chronicling northern opposition to the impending Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline. For funding, she turned to her old employer, the territorial government – and found that for filmmakers in the Northwest Territories, the public purse is all but clamped shut. For starters, the N.W.T.’s total arts budget is a mere $411,000: the cost of a single low-budget film, or about one-fifth the arts budget of the even-less populous Yukon. Worse, unlike all other provinces and territories, none of the N.W.T.’s money is earmarked for movies. Instead, filmmakers must compete for funding against artists and craftspeople working in far cheaper media. “This is not moosehair tufting,” Benoit says. “You’re talking a huge, huge endeavor financially. And if there’s no financial backing from the government, you’re basically S.O.L.”
For now, Benoit’s keeping her fingers crossed, hoping the National Film Board will bankroll her pipeline film. But as she waits, expenses pile up – and Yellowknife, given its isolation and gangbuster economy, is one of Canada’s costliest cities. Benoit says if funding hasn’t panned out in four or five months, she’ll have to abandon filmmaking and return to the workaday world.
Benoit’s not the only filmmaker whose professional future in Yellowknife is in jeopardy. Gamble already splits his time between Toronto and the N.W.T., and Bowick and Frame, Gordon’s co-conspirators on Baghdad or Bust, long ago pulled up stakes for big cities in the south. Even Gordon was forced to do the same, jumping ship for Ottawa, where he’ll work for another film co-op. He gives various reasons for the move: his family is down there, his friends have returned south, he just needed a change. “But mainly,” he says, “it’s because you just can’t support yourself as a filmmaker in the North. When you’re bringing in $900 and your rent is $600, it’s just not much to live off.”
Still, even having packed up his cameras and bidden adieu to the Subarctic, Gordon is optimistic about the future of film in Yellowknife. WAMP has hired a capable replacement to keep the film co-op vibrant. “And there are always new people coming into town, and students coming back from university,” he says. “So it’ll keep going.”
Aaron Spitzer is a freelance writer based in the Yukon.
