Fortescue Release Day

 I was trying to think of why I like Fortescue so much: it’s the story of two young women in Ontario cottage country trying to get a play off the ground, when one of their boyfriend’s show up and shake things up. That’s just the plot, which should be enticing enough, because it’s really well done. But there’s more to it than that.

For anyone who has been following the films of Rebeccah Love there’s such an intense satisfaction of finally seeing her first feature-length film after almost a decade of shorts. 

I think it was Brecht that spoke of the fragment, the self-contained miniature, different then say a draft or unsatisfactory short. Love’s work is full of these fragments, small artworks in themselves that shine much brighter than their size.

I think Fortescue is best described as a kaleidoscope: a small optical device that when you turn you see all of these beautiful shifting colours and shapes. It’s almost like a diamond: shiny and reflective, but there’s also something about it that’s imperfect, almost as if this diamond was cracked, not idealistic. Fortescue takes on such dark energy, trouble, and conflict.

Even in this remote Haliburton setting, in the middle of summer, with all of these beautiful people, the violence of the world still has a way to infiltrate it.

There’s this dichotomy of such beautiful images and such pain that makes Love work so raw, meaningful, and vital.

And it’s on full display here as equally it was on everything done prior.

There are hundreds of thousands of films out there, but there’s only one Rebeccah Love feature, Fortescue. And that’s why we need to love it.

I’ll be moderating the q&a with Love and her actors tonight after the 6:30PM screening at the Carlton.

Fortescue at the Carlton (July 24-25-26)

 I’m happy to announce that I’ll me moderating a panel discussion with Rebeccah Love and part of the cast of Fortescue at its Thursday, July 24^th screening at its Carlton Cinema screening (6:30PM). 

After its premiere at the Forest City Film Festival in the Fall and then a tour of Canada before finally having its Toronto premiere in June at Future of Film, these three screenings are a perfect opportunity for local audiences to come check out the film.

It’s a perfect summer film: Set in Haliburton, two best-friends, Lea (Kelsey Falconer) and Gabby (Chelsea Preston), one an actress and the other a playwright, idle in the sun, hang out by the water, meet neighbours and friends, rehearse, and one of their boyfriends, Kevin (Tyson Coady), even drops by.

Under the omnipresent heat, tensions of a crowded cottage, and stress over whether her new play will be a success things start to go awry for the three, and Lea’s past mental health problems slowly resurface.

By one of my favourite Canadian directors, it’s so great to finally discover her first feature-length film in her own city. I can’t recommend Fortescue enough!

Fortescue

One of the biggest cinephile pleasures of living in Toronto these past ten years was to follow the oeuvre of local filmmaker Rebeccah Love. From Drawing Duncan Palmer (2016) all of the way through Acres (2017), A Woman’s Block (2018), Ripe (2019), Parlour Palm (2020), Eve Parade (2022) and now Fortescue (2024), Love is proving to not only be one of the most interesting Toronto filmmakers but the most interesting one, I think. 

Sometimes described as the Emily Dickinson of Rosedale, Love’s work, which has resisted institutionalization, seems to be at the margins of the city’s film scene’s preoccupation as it deals with the intimate and the autobiographical, the intersection of art practices and mental illness. 

All the while never staid or didactic, Love’s work, which seems instinctual through her work with actors and sensuous when it comes to cinematography, benefits from cultural influences that extend far beyond cinema, whether it is literature, painting and theatre. 

(Love’s great blog Toronto Arts Report shows that she’s adept in following these developments too). 

I forget what philosopher it was that brought up the distinction between the fragment and the draft or sketch, but Love’s work leans more towards the fragment. In a body of work up to now filled with six official short-films and a feature-length film, and many other more confidential films, along with more confessional writing and unrealized screenplays, photography and illustration, there is almost the quality of a sparkling jewel to everything that Love does. As if these fragments were shards of a diamond broken off a greater one – rough and brilliant –, all of the while containing a sense of wholeness and poetry that stands alone in their more modest smaller form. 

(Notably in opposition to a lot of more “finished” work in the local film scene that feel more incomplete and unsubstantial which, for whatever reason, still gets so many acolytes).

 On Thursday, October 24^th Fortescue finally had its world premiere at the Forest City Film Festival in London, Ontario. It’s to the great honour of this festival that they rightly saw in Fortescue the merits that it holds and programmed it so well – I’ve never been to a nicer red carpet or reception for a film – and also a shame to all other national film festivals for not doing the same.

There was also something of the experience of travelling to London – almost two hours from Hamilton on a FlixBus and across a beautiful autumnal countryside – and of being in this beautiful smaller city in southwestern Ontario that contributed to appreciating Fortescue.

Love’s work always had its own temporality to it, especially in contrast to other Toronto filmmakers (that tend to emphasize the ambition of male protagonists and the business of the downtown core), as it retreats northwards and out-of-town, emphasizing experiences of stillness and contemplation, anxiety and depression.

Fortescue is set in the Haliburton cottage country and by Lake Fortescue (where it gets its name, and also from an old English idiom “Fort-Escu” meaning strong shield).

Fortescue begins with two women in their twenties, Lea (Kelsey Falconer) and Gabby (Chelsea Preston), enjoying each other and nature in this idyllic setting. One’s a playwright and the other one her friend and actress. They’re smiling, enjoying each other’s company, wearing bright clothes, happy.

And then Lea’s boyfriend and actor Kevin (Tyson Coady) arrives, though seemingly nice, a certain brashness emerges, which disrupts the harmonious relationship at the heart of this house. 

A sexual tension arises, conversations start to be more confrontational (discussing privilege and past traumas), Lea starts to experience episodes of psychosis, and another visiting friend Noah (Nickolas Franco) noticing this then decides to leave. The’re all getting ready for Lea’s upcoming production of Rapunzel (that stars Gabby and Kevin), which they’ll put on for their modest community in Haliburton, that includes Ms. Banks (Jacqueline Greer Graham) from the Stratford Theatre Festival that the’re trying to impress.

There’s something about Fortescue that seems new, especially in Love’s cinema, and it’s captivating to see Love bring her themes and craft from her shorts to a full-length feature.

There’s a naturalness and troubling quality to Kelsey Falconer’s performance of a young women experiencing a mental health crisis, which is either on par or equally as interesting as Sarah Swire did in Love’s earlier shorts (and same thing for Kelsey Falconer in her representation of it).

The drama and naturalistic style, sophisticated dialogue and inner anguish of Fortescue made me think of Noah Baumbach’s films (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding) or even, and maybe closer to us, Erik Anderson’s My Thesis Film (2018).

Two new qualities in Love’s work that I noticed was its emphasis on women sexuality and putting the perspective of the director in the film watching their own play (anxiously as it couldn’t be rehearsed).

Perhaps one of the most meaningful reflections that I had about Fortescue is that it brought to mind a quote from one of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (LXXXI), “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross. What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee. What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.”

Fortescue is bookended by female sorority. Lea’s mental health crisis seems almost instigated by Kevin’s arrival. The utopia that exists between Lea and Gabby is interrupted with his arrival and a positive experience of mental health can only recommence once he departs.

Aside from a critique of a toxic masculinity (which I think is more nuanced and thought-provoking then it is clear-cut, and encourages engagement and conversation), what I took from Kevin and his presence is that he incarnates an external social pressure in artistic production.

Per Ezra Pound, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.” 

What Lea lovest the most, well, is her friendship with Gabby, it’s where we see her the happiest, the rest is dross, Kevin.

For Love, who values and is outspoken for the need of safe spaces on productions and a healthy work environment, what is the most important are the working conditions on her productions, the friends and people there, and the relationship she has with all of these people (that extend beyond the production schedule). Per Pound, “What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.”

(When I asked Love about making Fortescue she said it was one of the best experience of her life).

And Kevin, these external pressures, it’s a healthy attitude to reject them and not to be determined by this external validation. It only brings stress and anxiety.

Life is confusing and Love is able to shed light onto darkness when it is especially hard therefore even more necessary.

We owe it to Love to express this so beautifully. 

Film Review: Eve Parade by Rebeccah Love

 Once again, I’m happy to share Mitch Greenberg’s review of Rebeccah Love’s newest short-film, Eve Parade, which will be premiering on April 16^th at the Paradise Theatre. – D.D.

 

I once attended a screening of Don Shebib’s Between Friends on the fourth floor of Robarts Library. The Canadian legend himself was there to introduce his film, and over the course of our brief conversation, he described his cinematic philosophy as ‘Hegelian’. Over the years, I’ve often pondered this enigmatic and polyvalent statement, unsure whether I’d ever fully grasp its meaning. Having recently seen Rebeccah Love’s Eve Parade, I believe I have inched closer to understanding what the Canadian legend meant.

Rebeccah Love’s cinema strikes me as Hegelian. Each film in Love’s cinema is an antithesis and synthesis to what came before it, and each new Love film presents us with a new thesis that will surely be challenged and reshaped by her future work. Like the work of any great artist, her oeuvre is like an entropic spiral in conversation with itself, growing truer with each swing of the pendulum.

Eve Parade is a synthesis of everything that Love has directed before it, and also marks a new direction. With Eve Parade, Love takes story elements from her past work and reshapes them into something new: a film about courage.

Love begins the film with a static montage of idyllic bliss - we see a peaceful coterie of presumably upper-middle class neighbours enjoying a pleasant afternoon in the liminal spaces of their front porches. When Love cuts to the film’s protagonist, Eve, the camera loses its static positioning, as if to signal the chaos that is about to unfold.

Eve directly addresses the camera, divulging her hopes and fears with eloquence and bravery. She divulges her neurodivergence directly to the camera as her neighbours watch with pity and misunderstanding. “I know things,” Eve whispers to us. Indeed, she does - she’s the only character aware that she’s in a film.

Eve’s neighbours pity her, dismissing her monologue as the babble of a sick person despite the fact that Eve is the only one among them who is aware of their metaphysical context. This reminded me of an insight about Renaissance attitudes towards insanity shared by Foucault in his Madness & Civilization: in Renaissance visual arts, ‘the mad’ are often ascribed a knowledge of the limits of the world, and in Renaissance literature, ‘the mad’ are people who reveal the distinction between what people are, and what people pretend to be. Of course, these attitudes have persisted well into the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries (think of Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, or even the Riddler from The Batman, who reveals the sordid corruption of Gotham’s leadership).

Mid-monologue, Eve is swiftly corralled by her neighbours and marched to a nearby hospital. Eve responds to this with fear, but also with profound courage. Despite her terror, she marches on, encouraged by her community.

The hospital is a place where people diagnosed with mental illnesses are habitually forced to take antipsychotic medications (which can result in tardive dyskinesia, weight gain, diabetes). The hospital is a place where the rights of people diagnosed with mental illnesses are often trampled (hospitals habitually detain their psychiatric patients, place them in isolation, place them in restraints, force them to undergo painful and horrific treatments against their will). Given this context, Eve’s concerns about heading to the hospital strike me as entirely reasonable.

Halfway through the film, one of Eve’s neighbours shares a story about a dog who was abused at a kennel. It’s a major highlight of the film - through this story, Rebeccah Love allegorically synthesizes with succinct and powerful writing the experience of systematic abuse that neurodivergent people have experienced at the hands of psychiatric institutions. This reminded me of a short anecdote about a beaten donkey from a Dostoyevsky novel (which was later adapted into Au hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson). Love’s story about the beaten dog holds so much power that I wish one day to see her adapt it into a purely allegorical film.

What is so remarkable about Eve Parade (inter alia) is the immediacy with which the theme of courage is explored. We see Eve confronted with coercion, misunderstanding, pity, and condescension. We see Eve corralled towards a hospital where she has likely experienced all kinds of horrors. Despite these horrors, despite these humiliations, Eve marches forward like a warrior. And like Eve, I look forward to seeing Rebeccah Love continue to courageously march forward - into unexplored cinematic territory.

 

Mitch Greenberg

Film Review : Parlour Palm by Rebeccah Love

I'm happy to share my friend's Mitch Greenberg's review of Rebeccah Love's newest short film, Parlour Palm, currently streamable via CBC Gem as part of the Future of Film Showcase. - D.D. 

***

Parlour Palm is everything the Canadian critical establishment has celebrated: an uncanny re-presentation of psychosis, an animated domestic drama, a philosophical enigma. But these remain insufficient grounds of celebration. Parlour Palm is something more: it is a rebuttal to Canadian cinema’s ‘tradition of quality’.

Canadian audiences have long lamented the general malaise of our national cinema, and providence has responded with Parlour Palm, a narrative art object of remarkable formal and thematic unity.

Parlour Palm begins with a static montage depicting the idyllic domestic life of partners Brayden and Mel. Rebeccah Love ingeniously frames the montage as though framing a doll’s house: her heroes live in spiritually hollow comfort, in atomized bliss.

But when Mel’s growing obsession with the apocalyptic implications of climate change clashes with Brayden’s professional ambitions, the plastic coating of their domestic life whittles away, revealing the scarred skin and strained sinews of Mel’s psychic terror.

As Mel’s obsession deepens, her thoughts and behaviour gradually grow more disorganized. Love depicts Mel’s decompensation from the confines of the dining room, as if Mel’s entire life is contained within those four walls.

The irony of Mel’s obsession with the environment is well observed: living as a virtual shut-in, Mel’s window into climate change is purely digital. She learns everything about climate change inorganically, through the mediation of a computer screen. She is remarkably disconnected from ‘the natural world’: she lives hermetically, has no professional life, no social life, no discernible hobbies, and her sole connection to ‘the environment’ exists through her coveted plant that sits listlessly in her parlour.

Given Mel’s hermetic existence, what could possibly be driving her obsession with climate change? Is her empathy theoretical, or does she personally know anyone suffering the consequences of climate change? Or perhaps her obsession with climate change functions as a psychological totem for more personal existential anxieties? And despite the remoteness of climate change to Mel’s life, are Mel’s anxieties reasonable given the magnitude of the impending climate apocalypse? Is it Brayden who’s living in pathological denial?

Fortunately, Love doesn’t answer these questions. To answer the basic questions of Mel’s psychology would be to neuter the film’s libidinal, mysterious energies. The mystery surrounding Mel’s decompensation is partly what makes the character so compelling. Sarah Swire’s performance of Mel is so immediate, audacious, and fearless, that Rebeccah Love rightly eschews any crude moments of psychological exposition.

The climax of the film occurs in a long take depicting a now floridly psychotic Mel giving some kind of theatrical performance for Brayden. Mel has transformed the dining room into a theatre, and she delivers a strange and compelling performance that includes poetry and song, in which she indicts Brayden, and herself, and the world, for their complicity in contributing to Mother Earth’s murder.

Rebecca Love’s cinema is a cinema of dramatic immediacy and formal invention. Love unifies Mel’s claustrophobia with an artificial, theatrical cinematic form. It’s as if Swire’s Mel is trapped within the artifice of the form itself, struggling to break free.

Mel is a character in the same vein as Brecht’s Galileo, or The Matrix’s Neo, or A Woman Under the Influence’s Mabel - Mel is a woman persecuted for her revelation of the truth.

I find myself left with this question about Love’s formalism: Is Parlour Palm a social film realized in cinematic terms? Or is it a cinematic film realized in social terms? Does it matter, when we have a new luminary of Canadian cinema?

Mitch Greenberg

Suggested Screening : A Woman's Block

Well August is almost over but summer doesn't officially end until September 22nd. So even though it's back to school and business for a lot of folks, why not try to enjoy the next few weeks to the fullest? Instead of packing up the outdoor gear and returning to a routine, it'll be good to relax and enjoy yourself and the city as much as you can while you still can. In the Toronto film community there's an exciting screening this week: Rebeccah Love is premiering her new short A Woman's Block, which has her team up again with Sarah Swire from Acres and is shot in her own neighborhood of Regal Heights but with a new improvisational style. It'll be on Tuesday, August 28th at The Pilot and it starts at 7:10PM sharp. There will be some special guests, too. See this great MUFF interview with Love for more information about the new short film and her process. Hope to see some of you there and enjoy the next few weeks!

Fixing People's Hearts (On Rebeccah Love's Acres)

Rebeccah Love’s work takes place at the interstice between life and art. For the up-and-coming Toronto filmmaker reality is meant to be shaped and dramatized through narrative and mise en scène to get at the heart of human experiences. Love’s focus is on how people feel and how these emotions can have a lasting impact. Take Acres for example: Set at Love’s grandfather’s farm, where she spent childhood summers, the creation of the film becomes an opportunity to re-experience and build from both its real and affective geography. The result of this farm life energy is that of a slower pace and melancholy beauty, which is only accentuated by Thomas Hoy’s beautiful score. Its story revolves around the reunion of Yannick (Edmund Stapleton) and Harriet (Sarah Swire), a former couple, who haven’t seen each other for many years after he moved away from the city when his father died. The time that these two spend on the farm, after Yannick’s sister (Erica Hill) and her partner (Patrick Love) leave, is spent maintaining it and exploring its scenic surroundings – the gorgeous pastoral countryside and the warmth of its interiors are made especially striking by Love’s regular cinematographer Eric Rowe. The two finally get closer to each other and have a deep conversation about their recent lives, failures and desires while looking at Harriet’s old photographs from when they were still together. The idea of Acres is to use this space as a site of healing. Acres creates the idea of escaping an absorption of urban and social life to learn to experience nature anew, overcome regret and contemplate life to find inner peace. It’s this examination of the emotional lives of its characters that makes Acres so rich.

Acres is great new feat for the Toronto film community. After a boom of new directors in the city around 2010, some of whom grew in prominence and were able to define a Toronto DIY style (Kazik Radwanski, Matt Johnson), and then a wider explosion of fresh directors throughout the country there’s still been, outside of some burst of creativity, the slow solidifying of clichés, many of which are encouraged by public funding agencies and film programmers, that have reaffirmed many long-standing negative perceptions of English-language Canadian cinema. Such critiques of its most common forms includes inadequate dramaturgy and a reluctance towards narrative, bad acting and a televisual style, plots that revolve around trauma and unfunny comedies… But, happily, this sad state is changing! Just in 2017 there was the Québécois film All You Can Eat Buddha (probably my favourite Canadian feature in recent memory) and the Toronto feature-length films Sundowners, Dim the Fluorescents, Wexford Plaza and the short-films Sweet Yoyo and La chasse. There needs to be more works that challenge the stereotype of Canadian cinema, which is that it’s boring and miserabilist, for it to be able to move forward. There needs to be the desire to create mystery and instill wonder instead of submitting to the sad realities of society. For it to not be limited by maintained restrictions and instead to imagine new possibilities.

Rebeccah Love is perhaps one of the best new directors that symbolizes such hope for these developments. If Acres protests the inadequacies of the Canadian film industry it does so by eliding its drawbacks and clichés by being truthful to Love’s singular vision. Its message of care is solely lacking in our national cinema and its form – a hard to program twenty-six minute short film – is an example of just one of its traits that goes against the standardized norm. Love’s practice is also enriched by being a multi-disciplinary artist – she writes short fiction, illustrates and has a background in theater, among many other things – which enriches her works’ points of references while also enlarging the types and variety of media in her corpus, all of which are personal and made with care. The production of Acres was also a more intimate affair as it was crowd-funded by friends and family with perks including drawings and pies, which are also nice references to Love’s other short films Drawing Duncan Palmer and Circles, and made with some of the best peers from her film production program from when she studied at Ryerson.

Just like how Acres centers around Harriet’s photography and finding new ways to look at the surroundings and the world, so do Love’s images re-orient the spectator’s vision. Love’s work, and specifically Acres, creates a new way to see as it imagines a different way to look at cinema and the world. Acres fulfills everything and more than you would expect from Canadian cinema as it proposes something new, something from the heart, beautiful and melancholic. This is what makes it so vital. But perhaps it’s Love’s producer Aleksey Matviyenko that best describes her by saying that she should have been a doctor because what Love actually does is that she fixes people’s hearts. Something that the world desperately needs.

Rebeccah Love’s Acres will be premiering this Wednesday, January 10^th at 7PM at the Carlton in a program that includes shy kids’ the middle and I feel like a failure, Union Duke’s Heavy Wind, Efehan Elbi’s Rainfall, Kazik Radwanski’s Scaffold and an introduction by Matt Johnson.

Short Film Recommendation : Rebeccah Love's Garden

A Cinema Of Imagination in English Canada

The release of Big Little Lies out now on Blu-ray is a reminder of what’s lacking so much in Canadian cinema: beauty, generosity and spirit. The community of and around these three mothers and their children is going through many challenges and problems but there’s a resilience that holds everyone together. The interior emotional world of these characters oscillates between anger and joy, sadness and humor. It’s by this fine balance, accentuated by a powerful soundtrack, that Big Little Lies captures a truth of the human spirit today. The image that comes to mind is that of Madeline telling people to fuck off with a smile as she has the best interest of her family and friends in mind. That is to mean well and to fight for it. In Big Little Lies everyone are themselves: they are complex characters that have experienced challenges, they are beautiful and full of emotions, they need to be loved and are loving, and at the end they get what they need (to cite the Rolling Stones song that plays during the end credits). If Jean-Marc Vallée is still the best working Canadian director it’s not because he has gone stateside and has more resources (though this is obviously a plus as it has given him more freedom), it’s because he proposes a cinema of three things: dreams, imagination and winning.

            So to repeat these three terms, since they are so necessary though actually scarce: dreams, imagination and winning. Dreams as it’s so important to believe in a future or another world where so many of today’s problems are no longer prescient and happiness is possible. Imagination as it’s necessary to believe, to imagine these possibilities and relationships to make them real. And finally winning as it through these wishes coming true and perseverance eventually paying off, which gives meaning to the struggle that it took to get there. Humanist beliefs for sure, but why have they become so hard to find and rare in an English Canadian cinema? Why is it when so many Canadian directors finally get a chance to make a film the end result is usually the opposite: reality, oppression and defeat? A collective imagination doesn’t have to essentially rely on social reality and its problems, an individual defeat that’s a symptom of institutional malaise. Why instead of dreaming success and victory that instead so many of these directors put forward defeat and failure? I know that the world is and can be a shitty place but this only makes the potential for imagination and victory even more important: at least in art it doesn’t have to be.

            Jacques Rancière can be valuable here as he has a novel manner to articulate the link between art and democratic politics. His concept of the distribution of the sensible refers to the communal forms of naturalized perception within a particular social order. For Rancière social formations are naturally oligarchic therefore the powers of artistic operations are capable of reconfiguring hegemonic perceptions of reality. Art is able to dispute any sense that existed meanings of socio-cultural life is inevitable. This can be seen in his two favored regimes of imageness: the artistic image for Rancière, which creates discrepancies within a given order of expectation of reality as it attempts to dismantle normalized standards of representation; and symbolic montage that connects disparate elements to create affinities, whose co-belonging shows these elements as being part of the same world, as it blends familiarity with mystery. Two other important terms are politics which for Rancière is anything that reframes the sensory community and police which is anything that reinforces the status quo.

            Through a Rancièrien perspective the positive qualities of this idea of an English language Canadian Cinema of the Imagination becomes political, in that they imagine a world of co-habituation while also troubling the apparatus, the institutions that circulate in the financing and distribution of these works. 
            The current genre of the English Canadian miserablist drama seems to be have been solidified by the institutionalization of the discourse formations of and surrounding the work of Atom Egoyan – whose films regularly denounces the problems of society and shows the effects of alienation, while routinely being celebrated for it – as this model, and themes about Canadian fiction like the garrison mentality and weird sex and snow shoes, has ended up creating a collective imagination of individuals being separated instead of finding a place within a larger social community. This ossification might have its roots in the creation of a state-sponsored fiction film industry in favor of social portrayals and in opposition to the communal popularity of American films. It can even be seen as disseminating into current CBC television productions like the reboot of Anne of Green Gables that focuses more on sensationalism and violence than the earlier joyous moments and accomplishments of its original. In this context programming can be seen as supporting this industry and curation favoring those that work within this system.

            Part of this problem is that there are so few directors with a clear, personal vision of hope. Instead of believing in coherence and breath the reigning model is that of fragmentation and group-consensus. Feeding social expectations and stereotypes instead of exceeding them.

If there’s a noble tradition in English Canadian cinema its roots can be seen in the work of Don Owen and Allan King: the documentary tradition, focusing on the people and streets of Toronto and elsewhere, as it hesitates towards fiction. In this middle-ground there is room for imagination to appear where through improvisation surprises can occur to show off what makes us unique. This tradition can be seen as continuing in the work of Kazik Radwanski (Scaffold) and Matt Johnson (Nirvanna The Band The Show). But there’s also a more imaginative Canadian film history hidden behind this: I’m thinking about the line that traces John Paizs’ Crime Wave to Matt Johnson’s Operation Avalanche in English Canada, and Gilles Carle’s La vie heureuse de Léopold Z to Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. in Québec. A leap to dreams, imagination and winning is possible and nobler. And there’s a history of these works in Canadian cinema that shows it has been done in the past. Some examples that come to mind includes King’s Who Has Seen the Wind?, Peter Mettler’s The Top of his Head, Donald Brittain’s Family: A Loving Look at CBC Radio and Terrance Odette’s Saint Monica.

So how to break the mold? How to combat individualism and cynicism? The answer, to restate it, is quite simple (though hard to achieve): find the possibility to dream, imagine and find success (how ever intimate it’s defined: it can be as small as two friends high-fiving after a rough day). Some recent examples that come to mind that strive for this includes Pierce Csurgo and Mitch Greenberg’s La Chasse and its fantasy narrative to recover a stolen painting; the expanded cinema route of Rebeccah Love’s live readings of short stories and plays and the over-ambitiousness of the longer short film Acres; or finally Mark Cira’s work that’s oversaturated with symbolism whether through the story of a young girl being diagnosed with diabetes (Sweet Yoyo) or an out of control Instagram short.

This Cinema of Imagination in English Canada would be one that’s loyal to one’s emotions and intellect. It would need to be faithful to one’s personal history and the people that have crossed it. It’s currently what’s so exciting about Canadian cinema and it might just have to take place at the margins: A small group of friends making work, coming together and dreaming that happiness and success is possible.

New Trailer : Acres

Vimeo Recommendation : Props Girl

The Look of Love

Rebeccah Love’s Drawing Duncan Palmer is finally getting its first public screening at the MDFF screening series and it should be memorable. It’s a touching short film as it peels away the superficial rhetoric of Toronto to focus on more honest emotions: what’s it like to lonely and what it’s like to be sad. In it Miriam (Chloé Hung) and Zoe (Love) had organized a fundraiser for a scholarship in the memory of their recently deceased professor Dr. Crawford and which their fellow student Duncan (Andrew Spittal) had outbid everyone else to win the opportunity to have Miriam draw his portrait.

Drawing Duncan Palmer begins with Miriam spending time alone preparing to hang out with Zoe to go over the results of the silent auction. There’s an elegance to this scene as Miriam takes her time baking cookies and preparing some snacks. You see her get all of the ingredients ready, mix them in an ornamented bowl, put the batter in the oven and quietly drink some water while waiting for everything to be ready. Love’s camera captures an appreciation for the smaller moments of life and the reserve of having to do it alone, which is only heightened by Thomas Hoy’s elegiac score. When Zoe does finally arrive (talking about gardening, almost in anticipation to Acres) they have fun and she encourages Miriam to ask Duncan out on a date (why else would he spend so much on a portrait?) on the Saturday when he comes over. She’s eager and nervous and courageous when she finally poses Duncan the question but as it turns out he only bid so much for the portrait so that he could put it up in his apartment beside that of another one of a person whom he truly misses.

With an official filmography of just a few short films: Drawing Duncan Palmer along with Abacus, My Love, Pitching for the Heights, Circles (which she wrote and art directed) and the upcoming Acres Love already has an impressive oeuvre. But as it turns out it also includes a series of videos that can be found on her YouTube channel beccahlove.

These videos reveal almost an experimental filmmaker stage in Love’s oeuvre as these home movie-style works include stylistic effects that further heighten everyday experiences to the level of poetry. In them the world, Love’s relation to it and its filming become organically intermingled so that an imagination becomes the starting point: people get out of their comfort zones to be freer to enjoy and live life. What especially stands out is how Love is able to joyously capture communities coming together and the casual articulation of a philosophical idea. Behind these modest works with their emphasis on a joyousness and imagination is the expression of an egalitarian politics and democracy: access to community and country is a moral right and everyone has a role to play in the pursuit of the common good.

If there are negative repercussions of a gender imbalance in the Canadian film industry: it’s that there aren’t more films like those of Rebeccah Love that have such a kindness to them (though Mes nuits feront écho by Sophie Goyette that’s premiering at FNC or Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Never Eat Alone that’s premiering at VIFF are steps in the right direction). Rebeccah Love’s films are a reminder of how the gift of intimacy can speak volumes.

Rebeccah Love Directing Acres

New Canadian Film Movement: Toronto DIY Filmmakers

Abstract

This essay will analyze the Toronto DIY Filmmaker movement through studying some of its more prominent figures and their work. Each filmmaker will be isolated (with the First Generation filmmakers grouped together in their own section) and discussed in regards to how they contribute to the representation of Toronto as a cinematic city. There will be a focus in terms of their films, public activities, and reception. Through studying the Toronto DIY filmmakers as a group hopefully a broader sense of their diversity and preoccupations emerges, as it is through their growing size that the movement stands out. Included would be a working filmography. The introduction will contextualize the movement’s major themes, stylistic approaches and relation to the Toronto New Wave.

Introduction

To broadly define the Toronto DIY Filmmaker movement: Their dominantly narrative films, shot with digital cameras, by young Toronto filmmakers, about Toronto residents, set in Toronto. The origins of the movement can be traced back to 2009-2010 with the completion of Kazik Radwanski's MDF Trilogy and Matt Johnson's Nirvana the Band. These works are important due to the international recognition that they received, groundwork they laid that led to their respective filmmaker’s future projects, and larger local visibility that led to both Radwanski and Johnson becoming public figures for the movement which since then led has led to the creation and merging of a broader artistic community surrounding each of them.

The methodology of studying filmmakers as auteurs in a Canadian context is argued for by George Melnyk who writes,  “Canadian cinema is director-driven… The reasons for this are rooted in Canada’s cultural history as a colony, as well as its tradition of state support for cinema that ends up emphasizing directorial accomplishment.” For Melnyk, who defines Canadian cinema as being integral to Canadian culture, the work of these auteur filmmakers reflect the Canadian cultural psyche in terms of nationality, race, gender, ethnicity and class. Melnyk argues that the Canadian film director has risen to the status of a cultural icon, and that, “The auteur director has been integral to the Canadian cinematic imagination and has served as its prime foundation.”

The emergence of the Toronto DIY filmmakers parallels other new national and generational filmmaking movements that were taking place around the world. For example, the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma around this period had a feature, New York: La Génération ‘Do It Yourself’, in their September 2011 issue, where they interview a range of up-and-coming independent New York filmmakers. As well the Québécois magazine 24 Images proposed a similar conceptual framework in their discussion of a ‘New Québécois Generation’ of filmmakers, which from this group Denis Côté has been an important influence on the Toronto DIY Filmmakers, regularly seeing each other when he would bring a new film to TIFF, he would provide a model of a festival filmmaker and offer constructive criticisms to some of them. Many of the issues surrounding filmmaking and how to represent their respective cities in both of the aforementioned magazines were simultaneously occurring in Toronto, which for these Toronto DIY filmmakers meant that they were starting to get notice from the Toronto-based film magazine Cinema Scope who would highlight some of their work.

The Toronto DIY filmmakers offer a youthful, fresh perspective on growing up in the city – childhood and schools are an important feature of them and so is being a young adult – and they offer a unique look on specific parts of Toronto’s urbanism and geography. The year 2010 is important for the movement because these filmmakers would have experienced the first decade of the 21^st century in Toronto while also allowing for a temporal rupture with the previous one as they could start tabula rasa on how to conceptualize the city for a new decade.

An important aspect of the movement is that it is do-it-yourself, which means that it excludes major productions and films with major funding (including those by more privileged young filmmakers). The freedom of being in charge, and having to work for, deciding on the content (however modest or crude), form, distribution is integral to this group. These DIY filmmakers typically use non-professional, non-ACTRA actors and technicians, and they do not work within the industry or with its unions. The rise in prominence of digital filmmaking equipment has been a great resource to these filmmakers, as perhaps were it not have been available, they might not have been as productive and unconventional as they are. Also of importance is how with the technological developments of many of these new digital cameras, which the Toronto DIY filmmakers have relatively easy enough access to (mostly from film schools or film cooperatives, while some even own their own equipment) and their greatly improved image and audio recording quality, this had led to a matched professional standard of much of their work.

The Toronto DIY filmmakers can be seen as the spiritual successors to the Toronto New Wave of the mid-eighties (and perhaps even further back to Don Owen making one of the first Toronto films in 1964) as many of the ideas of an original and challenging new Canadian cinema along with publicly debated issues and problems, in terms of financing and distribution, have remained quite constant since the eighties.* For example, Aaron Taylor in Great Canadian Film Directors writes,

Collectively, the Toronto New Wave turned its back on traditionalist representations of urban Canada, contributing to the formation of a recognizable national cinema that finally made its presence known in the international market.

While Paul Salmon, also in Great Canadian Film Directors, characterizes the Toronto New Wave in more depth as,

Emerging in the mid-1980s, this group shares a number of basic characteristics, including: a rejection or at least deep questioning of the entrenched Canadian tradition of documentary realism, an openness to experiment in terms of narrative structures and subject matter, and a willingness to embrace collaboration and artistic versatility. While many New Wave filmmakers have been outspoken in their interest in remaining in Canada and in supporting an indigenous Canadian film industry, they often share an equally fierce desire to remain unfettered by any sense of obligation to focus on traditional Canadian subjects.

           

But were the Toronto New Wave or even now the Toronto DIY Filmmakers truly independent, and what does this even mean? Well the answer is complicated. Though some of the filmmakers receive Canadian art council grants and others investments from Telefilm, it is never guaranteed. Others crowd-source money from friends and family and make their films with a small group of friends while others actually have their own production company and are actually paid to make films or shows. So there is a broad spectrum of economic resources available to them, which varies depending on their commercial and critical success and where they are in their careers.

But perhaps, and to further connect the Toronto DIY filmmakers with the earlier Toronto New Wave, it is actually Bruce McDonald, from his special Outlaw Edition of Cinema Canada which he put together in 1988, who offers one of the best portraits of what are the goals, drives, and desires of what it is like being a young working independent filmmaker (which necessitates also having another, ‘real’ job to afford living costs) in Toronto,

This issue is on the concerns and viewpoints relating to the Toronto independent film community as opposed to the film industry, the Outlaws as opposed to the Establishment Cats. We’re sending this out as a communiqué from one community to another with the hope of offering an alternative view of filmmaking in this city… The Toronto Independent Filmmaker is a hard bird to define because the work covers the spectrum… If there is any trend or school emerging from Toronto the Good, it must have something to do with the desire to break on through to the other side. It is definitely not a political cinema or a cinema of urban realism. Many of the films are attempting to open portals into surrealism and stepping through the stiches in time… Toronto filmmakers are creating the Cinema of Escape. Not escapist cinema by any means, for the work has the highest respect for its audience, but a way out of our home turf as we know it, flying deeper into the century, venturing into a world where time loses its meaning, searching for someplace west of lunch, someplace close to the edge, somewhere where East meets West and north and south do not exist. Living, growing, and working in a city as stolid as Toronto, this is not a difficult concept to grasp… Now as far as the term outlaw goes, one might argue that these people can’t be coined as true outlaws because they’re all camped out on the doorsteps of every government funding agency in the book. Yet I would argue that the term does apply ‘cause we’re just casing the joints, every damn one of us is on the run from at least three people we owe money to, we operate outside the established parameters of tried and tired formulas of film production and storytelling and, most important, we realize and revel in the fact there are no rules. We’ve discovered that nobody else really knows what’s going on, and we aren’t going to put all our precious time into pretending like we do. We’re going to drive all the way till the wheels fall off and burn. The term Independent is quite useless, especially in this country where there is no studio system to be independent from… The enemy of the would-be outlaw filmmaker lies first in themselves, and in the timidity of the community and industry in thinking there are rules they must follow. There ain’t.

David Davidson

* See for example Radheyan Simonpillai’s Why Matt Johnson is taking Operation Avalanche to Sundance instead of TIFF (Toronto Now, January 21, 2016), Johanna Schneller’s Director Andrew Cividino navigates Canadian system to find success (The Globe and Mail, April 07, 2016) and Jason Anderson’s Adaptive Auteur: Independent Filmmakers Struggle to Survive in a Changing Landscape (CFC News, May 2, 2016).

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Toronto DIY Filmmakers

Kazik Radwanski (1985 –   )

Films: Assault (2007), Princess Margaret Blvd. (2008), Nakuru Song (2008), Out in That Deep Blue Sea (2009), Green Crayons (2010), Tower (2012), Cutaway (2014), How Heavy This Hammer (2015).

Born and raised in Toronto, east of the Don Valley River around Riverdale and the Danforth, having attended the Montcrest school and then film production at the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University, Kazik Radwanski has the privilege of making the first full length feature of the Toronto DIY movement Tower (2012), about an odd young man Derek who pursues an animation passion project while also working construction for his uncle and trying to find a girlfriend. The Toronto DIY filmmaker movement came to fruition with Tower as the film was full of subtle and important Toronto references from its focus on young adult anxieties, engaging with a less seen and personal encounter with the city, to its title that refers to the iconic CN Tower, to prominently featuring one of the city’s more infamous habitants, that of the ubiquitous raccoon. Tower also benefited from receiving critical acclaim and international attention as it had its international premiere at the 2012 Locarno Film Festival before playing in the city at TIFF.

Tower is important because it provided the start of the rise of the movement’s young and unique perspectives on the Toronto experience. Radwanski speaks about making the film in a Toronto DIY Filmmakers feature on The Slate,

When I made Tower and my first few shorts it really felt like I was all alone. I looked up to people like Denis Côté and Nicolás Pereda but there was no one making English-language films that I really related too… I like to tell stories that I feel are true to Toronto. I’m not sure exactly what they are but I know what they are not. I don’t want to force big stories on the city.

Tower was the logical conclusion of Radwanski’s MDF trilogy (which gathered its name from his and his producer Dan Montgomery’s production company Medium Density Fibreboard Films) that includes the three short films Assault (2007), Princess Margaret Blvd. (2008) and Out In That Deep Blue Sea (2009), which all gathered attention from premiering at the Berlinale Shorts Competition. Radwanski speaks about the transition in an interview with Adam Nayman in Metro Toronto as, “I’d spent so much time developing characters (in my shorts) that it seemed like a shame not to do more. We wanted to allow ourselves more time to dig deeper and live with the characters longer.”

Since then he has made Cutaway (2014) a sorrowful study of the death of child through expressive Bressonian close-ups of hands, which he dedicated to his father who had recently passed away. His sophomore feature How Heavy This Hammer (2015) continues the project of Tower by focusing on another odd Torontonian, a father of two sons, as he avoids taking care of his health, has conflicts with his wife that leads to a separation, violently playing rugby and sitting at his computer playing a Viking-oriented computer game. Radwanski and Montgomery are also responsible for the exciting MDFF Screening Series, now at The Royal, which is the unofficial social hub for many of the Toronto DIY filmmakers. He is also now in the process of getting his Masters in film production from York University where he has a few different projects in the works.

Matt Johnson (   –   )

Films: Nirvana: The Band (2010), The Dirties (2013), Operation Avalanche (2016)

In an interview with The Seventh Art in 2013 Matt Johnson spoke about how that there was not a young Toronto filmmaker community, and perhaps he was right, but since then in the following few years many of these filmmakers came to know each other, meeting in Toronto or abroad at film festivals through mutual acquaintances, film critics and programmers, and since then more of their films have been screening publicly in the city while more filmmakers have also been appearing, graduating from film schools or moving to Toronto from other cities. Johnson has been one of the most public and encouraging figures of the first generation Toronto DIY filmmakers through providing crash courses in DIY filmmaking in one of the Nirvana: The Band audio commentaries and publicly advocating for more support networks for younger filmmakers. By actively making films in opposition to more traditional funding bodies (whose mandate and criteria has the potential for a homogenizing effect) Johnson’s films are refreshingly original in terms of Canadian cinema as they address particular taboo subjects: a dark comedy high school shooting film (The Dirties) and a Stanley Kubrick moon landing conspiracy film (Operation Avalanche). By skirting the line between documentary and fiction (most of his work is labeled as being ‘documentaries’), which coincided with a loosening of fair use laws, Johnson has been able to get away with appropriating more commercial images than most others (who would have to pay large fees to include them). The web-series Nirvana: The Band was about two young musicians, Johnson and Jay McCarrol (playing versions of themselves), trying to book a concert at The Rivoli. This critique of privileged cultural institutions is pursued further in Operation Avalanche (2016) against the CIA and will take on an even more national dimension in Johnson’s proposed critical John A. Macdonald biopic. Johnson, unique in this movement as an actor-filmmaker, has taken to acting in the films of some of the Toronto DIY filmmakers, such as Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson’s Diamond Tongues (2015), Radwanski’s How Heavy This Hammer, and Calvin Thomas, Yonah and Lev Lewis’ Spice it Up. (And some of them have even returned the favor by having small roles in Johnson’s films). Johnson’s production company Zapruder Films is best seen as a collaborative community, all taking on other projects to stay active, but returning to Johnson’s films for their originality and audacity.

* They include the producer Matthew Miller, who previously directed Portage (2008), the co-writer Josh Boles, the assistant director Matt Greyson, the cinematographer Jareed Raab, who is credited for the Johnson-written The Revenge Plot (2011), and the former co-writer Evan Morgan who has a new feature in the works.

Pavan Moondi, Brian Robertson (   –   )

Films: Everyday is like Sunday (2013), Diamond Tongues (2015), Sundowners (in production).

After founding the online video interview film magazine The Seventh Art along with Christopher Heron, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson took to filmmaking (with at first Robertson just producing, before they would start to co-direct). So far they have been the best at representing Toronto as a young party city (which is paralleled by some of their own production stories and launch parties), even though it is still presented as a city leveled with a frustration of unfulfilled ambition, difficulty of finding work and romantic separation. With an attempt to maintain a true geography of the city, recognizable locations such as the Dundas and Ossington blocks, the Queen street strip of malls and other smaller neighborhoods are regularly in the background or are used as exposition to be as faithful to the representation of the city as it is lived through personal experiences. Through its specificity the films allow for a stronger identification with its story. Everyday is like Sunday (2013) is interesting, though flawed, due to a rushed and partly unprepared pre-production. Inspired by the teenage melodramas of American television, such as The OC (2003-2007), and also a Morrissey song from where it gets its title, Everyday is like Sunday is about a few friends dealing with love issues, friendship and trying to find work in Toronto. Moondi and Robertson’s follow-up Diamond Tongues (2015) about a struggling actress is more varnished and successful as it was made with more pre-production and on a larger scale, with a better lead actress (Leah Goldstein, from the band July Talk) and more financial resources. Diamond Tongues was generally well received, which has led to bigger projects for the duo that includes Sundowners which will be set in Mexico and will star the stand-up comedian Phil Hanley, Luke Lalonde from the band Born Ruffians, and Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric.

Andrew Cividino (   –   )

Films: I Norbert (2007), Mud (2009), We Ate the Children Last (2011), Yellow Fish (2012), Anatomy of a Virus: The Making of Antiviral (2013), Sleeping Giant (2014), Sleeping Giant (2015).

The unexpected success of Cividino’s career so far has been the selection of his first full-length feature Sleeping Giant at the 2015 Cannes Critics' Week (a first for any of these filmmakers), which gathered it a plethora of accolades, who were happy to see a good English Canadian film by a young Toronto filmmaker finally playing at the prestigious and hard-to-get-into French festival. The story is about three young boys spending their restless summer in Thunder Bay. Cividino allowed the boys to just be themselves and to improvise, which led to some really great and surprising moments in the film. For his follow up Cividino will turning his earlier short-film We Ate the Children Last, based on a Yann Martel story, into a feature. Cividino works closely with his producer Karen Harnisch (who also produced The Oxbow Cure and has an upcoming collaborative project in the works, Delta Venus) as they run their company Film Forge Productions together. Cividino’s short films Mud and We Ate the Children Last were both co-directed with Geoffrey Smart and he also made the making-of Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral (2012).

Calvin Thomas, Yonah and Lev Lewis (   –   )

Films: Amy George (2011), The Oxbow Cure (2013), Spice It Up (2015), Sublet (production).

The feature film Amy George (2011) brought the working pair of Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis to the forefront of young Toronto DIY filmmaker movement. It is a film set in the Riverdale neighborhood where a young teenager Jesse has trouble fulfilling an assignment of taking a photograph that best represents himself. His teacher's advice is “you can find something interesting anywhere… you just have to look around,” which gets Jesse to explore his neighborhood and nearby parks to find something that meets this description. Experiencing anxiety about not being able to be a true artist without having experienced ‘true suffering’ (something which he read in the library in a book on the subject of being an artist) Jesse becomes worried that he might not be able to complete the project. With troubled relations with his parents, since they do not trust him and think that he is odd, Jesse ends up being closer with his younger aunt who he talks to bout his romantic affinity for a classmate Amy, who after playing with would become a source of guilt. Thomas and Lewis’ sophomore film The Oxbow Cure (2013) is darker and more brooding as in it a young Toronto woman retreats to a Muskoka cottage to recover from an illness and the death of her father (perhaps as an answer to the notion of the necessity of suffering for serious artists as mentioned in Amy George?) and once there is haunted by fantastical visions. The Oxbow Cure is a singular film for the Toronto DIY filmmaker movement as it is combines elements from an Ingmar Bergman drama (The Passion of Anna is said to have been an influence), experimental cinematography of nature à la Philippe Grandrieux (Un lac) and a vintage style hand-crafted movie monster (Swamp Thing). Thomas and Lewis are perhaps the Soderberghs of the Toronto DIY filmmakers as they work quickly and economically with a close team and Thomas and Lewis operate their own cameras. Yonah Lewis’s brother Lev started working with them as the composer of Amy George before taking on more responsibility to the point of co-directing their latest feature Spice It Up (which still has not premiered) to now directing his own feature Sublet.

Fantavious Fritz (  –  )

Films: Kosmos (2011), Tuesday (2012), Paradise Falls (2013), Lewis (2015).

A well-regarded short-filmmaker, having his work play at Short Cuts Canada at TIFF and even some getting on Canada’s Top Ten, but it was the audacity and warmth of Lewis (2015), which premiered at the MDFF screening series, that brought Fritz a lot more local and critical attention. Lewis is a story told from a cat’s point of view as he gets lost from his owner and starts to be taken care of by a senior woman. Lewis (the cat’s name) still gets to wander around the neighborhood, seeing the sights and having fun with kids, but he returns to her every night, where she discusses with him the sadness’s of her life and lovingly dances with him. Unfortunately she passes away one night and Lewis is trapped in the house, with very few ways to get out… Fritz moved to Toronto in 2011, and since then has formed a working team, who they share projects with, such as making music videos, while also having day job working on commercial media. In one of his earliest projects which he co-created with Austin Will, the bartender slides me a beer it runs down the bar like an Olympic sprinter, (2011), which title comes from a Charles Bukowski poem and whose voice-over is Bukowski reading a different poem Style, it is defined as “A fresh way to approach a dull or a dangerous thing… To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art,” and, “Cats have it with abundance.” Stylish and cat-like, a great way to characterize the beautiful work of Fantavious Fritz.

Nadia Litz (  –  )

Films: How to Rid Your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You! (2010), The Frame with Adrienne Clarkson (2012), The Good Escape (2013), Hotel Congress (2014), The People Garden (2016).

A popular Canadian actress before becoming a filmmaker, Nadia Litz perhaps offers one of the best models of how to remedy the gender disparity in feature filmmaking: for young women to just go out and make films themselves. Litz’s first feature Hotel Congress (2014), which she co-directed with Michel Kandinsky, was made as part of the Toronto independent filmmaking veteran Ingrid Verninger's 1K Wave, which recruited a myriad of younger Toronto filmmakers to make a film for under one-thousand dollars. This DIY catalyst makes Hotel Congress even more impressive as it was filmed at the real Hotel Congress (where the film gets its title) in Tucson, Arizona. Hotel Congress is a reflective, witty and funny comedy about a man and a woman who are at the hotel to have an affair in which they promise to be non-committal but where they inevitably fall in love. Perhaps a generation older than the DIY filmmakers the ethos of Hotel Congress definitively gives Litz a place within this movement. As well, along with others like Simon Ennis (You Might as Well Live, Lunarcy!), Daniel Cockburn (You Are Here), and Reginald Harkema (Monkey Warfare, Manson, My Name Is Evil), this generation of filmmakers fills the transitional years between the Toronto New Wave and the Toronto DIY filmmakers, through how they were able to express their youthful new directorial voices through more industrially driven projects. Litz new feature The People Garden (2016) is screening theatrically in the summer of 2016 and includes an impressive cast, such as Dree Hemingway and Pamela Anderson.

Rebeccah Love (1990–   )

Films: Pitching for the Heights, (2013), Circles (2013, as the writer/art-director), Abacus, My Love (2014), Drawing Duncan Palmer (2016), Props Girl (2016), Acres (in production).

Has there even been a Toronto filmmaker as committed to showcasing the beauty of Regal Heights before Rebeccah Love? Probably not, as since Love’s first short-film Pitching for the Heights (2013) about two friends exploring the neighborhood, playing baseball, and nostalgically recalling their youth; the neighborhood, its charm and slower pace has never been as beautifully portrayed. Love’s films are a nice counter-point to some of the more male-centric downtown work of a lot of the Toronto DIY films. A feminine and intimate filmmaker, Love’s Abacus, My Love (2014), her Ryerson graduating project, is a fairy tale of a young woman who finds the man of her dreams to rescue her from a despairing life. It is impressive for its theatrical effects and lavish production design. In a cinema filled with mourning and sorrow (the boy and father missing their mother in Circles and the missing mother in Abacus), the belief in dreaming and for something magical proposes the remedy to so much of life’s despair.  Drawing Duncan Palmer (2016) still needs to have its premiere and Love has a new project Acres in the works.

Sofia Bohdanowicz (   –   )

Films: falling with force. (2009), Dundas Street (2012), A Prayer (2013), An Evening (2013), Another Prayer (2013), Last Poem (2013), Never Eat Alone (2016), A Drownful Brilliance of Wings (2016), Maison du bonheur (2016).

Since the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland gathered five of Sofia Bohdanowicz short poetic films for a small retrospective Last Poems in 2014 there has not been any more public screenings of her work, even though since then she has made three more of them. Bohdanowicz’s greatest claim to fame in the Toronto DIY filmmaker movement is her short film Dundas Street (2012), named after the famous street that stretches across the city, which is inspired by one of Bohdanowicz's grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa’s (1895-1965) poems. Dundas Street is less a narrative than a visual poem, which emphasizes striking scenes and visual beauty. Dundas Street, which is co-directed by Joanna Durkalec, is set in the past (when Zofia would have first moved to Toronto) and is narrated by an elderly Polish woman who is discusses being unable to adapt to her new urban landscape. Dundas Street follows her efforts to find meaning in an inhospitable and unfriendly city. She speaks fondly of the fruit merchant Cornelius and in one stunning scene as he is cashing out, the lighting brightens, and he sings a sorrowful song. Hopefully more of Bohdanowicz’s newer work finally plays publicly on Toronto screens.

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First Generation Toronto DIY Filmmakers

Nicolás Pereda (1982 –   )

Films: Where Are Their Stories (2007), Interview with the Earth (2008), Juntos (2009), Perpetuum Mobile (2009), All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence (2010), Summer of Goliath (2010), Greatest Hits (2012), Killing Strangers (2013), The Palace (2013), The Absent (2014), Minotaur (2015), Tales of Two Who Dreamt (2016, which he made with his partner Andrea Bussmann).

Igor Drljača (1983 –   )

Films: The Battery-Powered Duckling (2006), Mobile Dreams (2008), On a Lonely Drive (2009), Woman in Purple (10), The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar (2011), Krivina (2012), The Waiting Room (2015).

Albert Shin (   –   )

Films: Pin Doctor (2006), Kai’s Place (2008), Point Traverse (2010), In Her Place (2014).

Luo Li (   –   )

Films: Fly (2004), Ornithology (2005), stills (__), I Went to the Zoo the Other Day (2009), Rivers and my Father (2010), Emperor Visits the Hell (2012),  Li Wen at East Lake (2015).

The First Generation label is a sub-group of the Toronto DIY filmmakers that categorizes filmmakers who immigrated to Toronto, Canada earlier on in their lives and studied, for the most of them at the film production program at York University, and with the skills, resources and community which they formed, took to filmmaking, with some making Toronto or Toronto-related, films, back to their country of origins to tell prescient stories affecting their own home country, while still returning to Toronto afterwards, where many of them live the rest of the year.

The term was coined by Radwanski who in 2011 programmed a First Generation series at the Lichter Filmtage in Frankfurt. Radwanski describes the initiative,

We were given carte blanche and told that we could program anything we like as long as it related to Toronto. Frankfurt is Toronto’s sister city and one of the festivals missions is to celebrate that fact. However, we soon found that all of our favourite local filmmakers were from somewhere else.

The focus of the program was on how the filmmakers could be informed by their city and its inhabitants, while also removing this context from their films. Radwanski define them as, “These temporary-residents play a role in Canadian cinema: their films maintain a connection to Toronto, while defining their own territories and landscapes.” Since this program in 2011 these First Generation filmmakers, and others which includes also Second and Third Generation immigrant filmmakers, have only rose in prominence. There is an emphasis on international co-productions and funding for this group. For example, Nicolás Pereda works closely with the Mexican production company Interior XIII and Igor Drljača has received the Hubert Bals Fund for project development on a new film Tabija. As well, these films have easier access and international recognition to play at more and different international film festivals and cities, whose mandate is to play more films from those other respective countries.

From this group Nicolás Pereda is perhaps the most prominent. Pereda moved to Toronto from Mexico at the age of nineteen to enroll in film production at York University. With his first feature film Where Are Their Stories? dating from 2007, in interim he has created a dozen films, ranging from full-length features to medium- and short-films, to pure fiction films to hybrids and documentaries. Pereda’s films are typically set in and around Mexico City, with a cast including his regular repertoire actors Teresa Sánchez and Gabino Rodríguez (whom typically play mother and son), dealing with themes of alienation and class disparity, and are characterized by motifs of repetition and formal experimentation.

Pereda’s low-budget minimalist form of filmmaking is also open to experiment with narrative and structural patterns. The splitting of the films into two parallel and contrasting parts regularly appears (perhaps an influence of Apichatpong Weerasethakul?) to interrogate and dissolve certain ideas of representation. As he discusses with Radwanski in a Cinema Scope interview, “Maybe you watched the Dardenne brothers and I watched Tsai Ming-liang or something like that…” These kind of hyper-conscious forms of storytelling might at first glance appear to be jarring, but they allow Pereda to interrogate his own motives and the filmmaking process. The films are character driven, with minimal plots, with typical scenes involving characters siting together in a slum-like room for long durations without any dialogue, filmed in a fixed long take. Typically there are also retreats to nature, which is never as utopian as the characters would desire.

            Since the 2012 TIFF Cinematheque retrospective Where Are the Films of Nicolás Pereda? (as the title seems to anticipate) Pereda’s recent films have not screened publicly in Toronto, except for Minotaur in the 2015 TIFF Wavelengths program. But this is not to suggest that Pereda has not been busy as since then he has made Killing Strangers (2013) with the Danish filmmaker Jacob Schulsinger as part of Copenhagen’s DOX:LAB collaborative initiative; his own films The Palace (2013), The Absent (2014) and Minotaur; contributed to Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013) and Gael Garcia Bernal’s omnibus film El aula vacía (2015); and finally made his first Toronto film, Tales of Two Who Dreamt, a documentary with his partner Andrea Bussmann, about the Hungarian Laska family in a low-cost housing complex as they await their day in court to confirm their asylum in Canada. As well Pereda has returned, now as a professor, to York University to teach a new generation of students film production. 

            Drljača and Albert Shin have had a close working relationship since their time at York. Drljača was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and moved to Canada with his family due to the Bosnian War (the subject of his autobiographical The Fuse). Shin, a Second Generation immigrant, was born and raised in Ottawa, and went to York for film production and has been living in Toronto since. They work together at their production company Timelapse Pictures, balancing directing and producing roles on each other’s films. Drljača’s two feature films Krivina (2012) and The Waiting Room (2015) are both partly set in Toronto (more so The Waiting Room) even though they both primarily deal with the Sarajevo diaspora (in Krivina the protagonist returns there), which is also the subject of many of Drljača’s short films. Krivina stars Goran Slavkovic (who Drljača has worked with on his earlier short films) who brings to the humble wanderer Miro a tough outer-shell with a buried sensitivity. The story is about Miro, a Bosnian refugee who works in construction, who returns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to search for an old lost friend who has been rumored to have reappeared. His other friend Drago (played by the Bosnian actor Jasmin Geljo) has many conversations with Miro as their driving to work in which he complains about the Harper government’s immigration policies.

            Geljo would return as the lead in The Waiting Room (and so would Slavkovic in a bit role) as a stereotyped working actor. He was prior a famous actor in Bosnia and now he is making a film in Toronto on a production stage about the wartime experience (the opening scene with its rear-projection is stunning). Geljo’s character has fraught relations with his whole immediate family: estranged from his first wife who is now in a terminal cancer ward, he is in what appears to be an unfulfilled second marriage, gets in fights with his daughter and cannot always relate to his son. The Bosnian psychic landscape that Geljo’s character left over twenty-years ago is omnipresent throughout the film. He tends of find solace in the intimate conversations in his own language with his closer friends, re-interpreting his native comedic performances, over drinks, as a last bastion of his previous life, which he can’t really express with anyone else. And even these moments end up in anxiety, frustration and misery. There are some wounds that cannot be healed – the psychic memory of the Bosnian war has left more victims than just the casualties.

            Formally the major influence on Drljača is Andrei Tarkovsky from the oneiric narrative structure and temporal leaps, reality and dreams seamlessly blending together to create something extremely hypnotizing. Two particular big influences are The Mirror (1975), for its flashback narrative structure and how it engages with the fracturing psychological effects of wartime experiences, and also Solaris (1972) for its famous highway-driving scene that leads into the city (Drljača’s films are almost all prominently set in or around cars).

            While Shin’s better well known for his feature In Her Place (2014) which is a critique of South Korean affluence as it is about a rich woman from Seoul who goes to the countryside to secretly, and exploitatively, adopt an unborn child. Filmed in South Korea, with a technical crew from both countries, Shin’s filmmaking approach blends Lee Chang-dong’s poetic realism with Luis Buñuel’s sarcastic surrealism. The difficulty to access Shin’s earlier feature Point Traverse (2010) and his previous short films Pin Doctor (2006) and Kai’s Place (2008) makes him a subject for further research.

And finally Luo Li, with four completed features in the span of six years, he is one of the more proactive filmmakers in the group. On top of that they have all had public and repeated screenings in Toronto. His graduate student film I Went to the Zoo the Other Day (2009) onwards to Rivers and my Father (2010) and Li Wen at East Lake (2015) all played at the Images Festival, while Emperor Visits the Hell (2012) played at the MDFF screening series, before they would all return for a TIFF Cinematheque retrospective, You Can't Go Home Again: The Films of Luo Li, in the summer of 2015.

Born in Wuhan, China, Li moved to Toronto to receive a BFA and MFA from York, and now lives in Hamilton, while returning to China to make his feature films. Perhaps his only true Toronto film is his first I went to the zoo the other day where two young Yugoslavian immigrants go to the city’s zoo, to overcome their depression and to experience the animal life. Made without any form of official permission, in an artistic black-and-white cinematography, with dialogue in Serbian, dealing with themes of alienation, an inability to communicate and personal reservations; it is one of the more stunning Toronto films from this group. Li’s following films are experimental documentaries set in China, that attempt to bridge the personal with the political, as he interrogates his own motives for going there and working while also examining the negative effects of the country’s rapid capitalism. For their meditative tone, use of fantasy, raw social portraits, and heightened and regular casting of the same actors they recall the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang.