Canadian filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton

Credit: Shona Dion

VFF: Leaping Forward

The Victoria Film Festival’s Springboard series dives into the minds of Canadian filmmakers

True, there’s a lot of movies to watch over the next 10 days of the 15th annual Victoria Film Festival (more than 150, actually), but there’s also a lot to talk about. What’s the current state of Canadian film? What needs to be done to help innovative projects get off the ground? How are different filmmakers across the country carving out their own creative niche? It was out of the desire for this type of dialogue—by Canadian filmmakers, for Canadian filmmakers—that the Victoria Film Festival came up with the idea of Springboard, two days of talks featuring some of Canada’s top up-and-coming filmmakers.

Last year, a jury—comprised of, among others, filmmaker Bruce McDonald and critics like Maclean’s Brian D. Johnson and CanWest’s Katherine Monk—compiled a top-20 list of who they felt were Canada’s most promising filmmakers. Those 20 were all invited to come to Springboard to share their thoughts and experiences on the film industry with their fellow filmmakers, industry folk or plain-old film junkies.

“It was a difficult one because trying to discover Canadian talent, the windows that we have are pretty small,” says Monk of the selection process. “It’s one of those tough things—at what point is someone in the business in Canada considered a newcomer, a groundbreaker or an established filmmaker? It’s so bizarre in our industry that pretty much the minute you make a movie successfully or you finish a feature, you’re almost an established filmmaker in this country.”

Nevertheless, Monk and her peers compiled an impressive list, and while not all who are on it will be in attendance, a great deal of them will. Folks like directors Garfield Lindsey Miller and Andrew Currie, or producers Floyd Kane and Rob Merilees (not to mention special guests such as actors Don McKellar and Liane Balaban, as well as jury members Johnson and Monk) are just a small sample of the 22 folks who will be at the Vic Theatre this weekend to share their thoughts on film.

“Honouring artists, especially independent artists, for their efforts has great value,” says filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton, a top-20 selectee who will be speaking at Springboard and screening two of his films: Writing The Land, a profile of Musqueam elder Larry Grant, and Nikamowin, an audiovisual meditation on language. “As we don’t have the funds and time to promote ourselves as needed, programs such as this help in this process greatly.”

Burton says he’s going to take his 20-minute opportunity at Springboard to talk about the loaded nature of terms like “traditional” and how this impacts him as an indigenous filmmaker.

“There are too many issues about how ‘traditional’ is defined and how this term shapes and defines Indigenous persons,” he says. “Within my artistic expressions, I look at linguistic, social, emotional, spiritual and psychological scenarios and try to make sense of how my ‘traditional’ values can be coherently iterated and/or demonstrated within a technological context. I do this to explore the many unanswered questions around how the notion of how ‘traditional’ is not only something of the past, but is current and ever fluid.”

A good example of Burton’s view that tradition is something that is contemporary and fluid would be his current work to develop new queer Cree legends. He’s started work on a short animation for the NFB and hopes the project—just one of several he is developing—would ultimately be a wide-ranging new-media endeavour.

“In my perspective, it is not okay for a culture that prides itself in its oral traditions to have an absence of queer stories—therefore, instead of complaining of absence, I would like to embark on creating various stories that put these scenarios and experiences into the world for us all to tell each other,” he explains.

Richie Mehta is another one of the jury’s top-20 who will be in attendance. Mehta, whose feature film Amal screened at last year’s VFF and has garnered critical acclaim, says he’s going to chat about the two different direction he’s been taking his filmmaking work—but not before he listens carefully to the rest of the speakers.

“I’m near the end of the whole thing, so I have ideas for three or four things but I also want to see what other people are doing. I don’t want to repeat what they say,” he says. “I’m starting to carve out two different platforms for myself. One where I do these experimental things and one which is a little more commercial . . . I am starting to differentiate between one type of movie and another and I like both for myself and I need both.”

Audiences will get a chance to see an example of Mehta’s more experimental work at the VFF this year, when he screens 678910, his brand-new film which tells the story of four soldiers’ journey across a desert.

“They are going to the end of the world to trade themselves for people they have lost in their lives,” he says of the film. “Shortly into their journey, they are told by a colleague that their queen has been killed and the first person across has to bring their queen back instead of their own loved one.”

Given Monk’s role in the Canadian film landscape—that of a critic—her presentation at Springboard will be coming from a different perspective.

“I want to talk about the landscape filmmakers are facing and how to overcome some of the challenges that it takes to make it in the business,” she says, adding that she also wants to address some of the criticism the media faces about supporting Canadian film, particularly when a Canadian critic gives a Can-con movie a bad review.

“People always point their fingers at the media for some of the failures in Canadian film,” she says. “I’m as vested in the Canadian cultural psyche as any other Canadian is. How do you share that enthusiasm and how do you get audiences interested in Canadian films? I don’t think it’s by giving soft reviews to weak Canadian films.”

And what does Monk feel is the landscape Canadian filmmakers have to navigate these days? Well, it might be a bit rocky (recent federal Conservative attempts to slap Canadian films with morality clauses comes to mind), but ultimately, Monk has faith.

“For someone who believes in the arts and their purpose in the larger world, I was really worried about some of the directions the Canadian cultural agenda had been taking,” she says. “The beauty of it is it seems the tougher things get for Canadians, the better the work becomes. It’s like we’re programmed for survival.” M