FEATURE
international festivals. We had spoken on and off in our encounters at the local YMCA. It was on a squash court that Darlene served me the biggest opportunity that I couldn’t pass on. She simply asked if I would be interested in making her next feature film. I said yes. I didn’t know exactly what it entailed, but I knew she was looking for somebody who had never worked as a producer, someone she saw potential in; I appreciated that opportunity. I distinctly remember being excited, but did my best not to show it at the time. From there, Darlene and I were successfully chosen as a National Screen Institute (NSI) award recipient in their Features First program. This happened within weeks of our rendezvous on the squash court. I was being sucked into this industry almost immediately. Of all applicants across Canada, we were one of five projects selected to go through a yearlong professional development experience. Working full-time at the creative agency, I used vacation time to travel to NSI planned events as part of this grant opportunity to incubate our project and nurture its development in the pre-production phase. The objective of this program was to break new feature filmmakers in by exposing them to Canada’s best of the best. NSI had that pull and they used resourceful staff and innovative programming to train us in the skills we needed to make this film a success. For Darlene it was about perfecting her script by lining her up with a professional screen editor, or by sending her to California to study how to direct actors. For myself, it was about pitching the film and selling the project to prospective financiers. Those skills would remain with me today, proving to be extremely useful beyond the film industry. Not everyone is fortunate to undergo the training we received from NSI, but I would say that not all budding filmmakers have the willingness to scout out these support networks. That’s a valuable lesson I try to pass on to any young filmmaker that I meet at festivals around Canada. Programs to support filmmakers at any stage of their development are widely available. Canada has a unique positioning to support and nurture Canadian content films because we’re neighbours with the world leader in filmmaking, the USA. Our governments recognize that our country needs that support to promote Canadian independent films. Without that support it’s extremely difficult to get projects off the ground and onto the big screen in order to share Canadian generated content with other Canadians, and for these films to be exported around the world. Understanding this cultural dilemma will assist in selling your independent film. So it’s important to recognize that you need more than the idea and script. You need to do your research in your province and tap into the envelopes of money allocated to film and television making (low interest loans or full out grants). This is a hard industry and it’s definitely not a profitable one. I share the resources that I have made, but only when someone shows a willingness to go further. I suppose this is relevant to any person who talks about something but misses the boat on what it takes to get there. Most of the time there are no lucky breaks; it’s just persistence and the will to want something. Get rejected? Learn from it! Dust yourself off and try again – considering that it is an independent film in Canada, it would be again and again and again. So part of my training involved selling my film and making the pitch. Getting this far into my article, I recognize that I didn’t even mention my film title and what it’s all about. It’s a stark contrast to what I was trained to do – make the pitch immediately. You only have 1 minute of face time when you meet someone important.
So here goes: “Hello, I’m Joseph Mansourian and I’m the Producer of Every Emotion Costs, a new feature film being shot in Northern Ontario on the First Nations community of Whitefish Lake First Nation. It’s a new film by Writer & Director Darlene Naponse, whose first feature screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Every Emotion Costs is a story about Quilla and her exploration of the reality of returning home to the First Nation reserve to face family, community and the ceremony of death. We follow Quilla and her sister June as they return to bury their mentally ill mother. Quilla has to deal with a sister she hasn’t spoken to in years, her past loves that emerge from the forest, and the resentment she had with her dead mother. Emotionally abandoned by her mother, we follow Quilla as she explores an upbringing of life on the reserve, past relationships, and find out what drove her away.”
Give or take a few words, that was essentially it. You would pitch to a few prospective funders or champions you knew who would go off and talk to others in the industry. Then you would try hard to foster a relationship to keep the conversation going and land another face-to-face meeting in a more formal setting. So, fully financed, the film went into production and was filmed in 16 days (it was supposed to be 18 days, but it started to snow hard and we improvised by shooting longer hours the days before). These 16 days were a true test of my patience. It was a low-budget film production that should have had a $2 million budget, yet we worked with a stretched $640,000. It was truly independent and considering the cast involved and the resilient crew, it had all the makings of a larger budgeted film.
HAPPINESS | ISSUE 9 | VEUX | 35