By Michael Radoslav

Photo by Michael Radoslav

Breaking into show business in Canada can often be a herculean effort.  Our country is known for having some of the toughest entry requirements for its performers union, ACTRA. This has been at times a discouraging reality for aspiring actors.

In November 2010, however, ACTRA cut its credit requirements for new members in half, from six credits to three – effectively welcoming, rather than restricting, membership. The vote in favour of making these new modifications was a resounding 82.1 per cent.

ACTRA Toronto, the largest chapter in the country, spearheaded the move to give those with the acting dream a better shot.

“The time frame was gapping larger rather than narrowing” says Heather Allin, president of ACTRA Toronto. “We thought six credits as a bar was set so high that not only do people have trouble getting over it, they give up before even giving it a try.”

The impact is already being felt. Marlene Cahill is the branch representative for ACTRA Newfoundland, a region where projects are primarily union. Although 95 per cent of productions in Newfoundland go through ACTRA they still witnessed a surge in enrolment. About 20 per cent of the branch’s members held between three and six credits, so they became eligible with the requirement change.
[pullquote]“It’s nice for people to feel embraced by the union instead of intimidated or estranged by it.”
- Bryn McAuley, YEAA[/pullquote]

The move is a boon to young performers, many of whom joined as apprentices before gaining enough credits to reach full membership status. “They’ve been telling us for years that this is taking forever,” says Karl Pruner, director of communication of ACTRA Toronto. Pruner says young actors grouped together and presented well-founded and economically sound concerns, but the jobs to help them reach their goals simply were not there.

Despite the new rules, Pruner maintains ACTRA still has some of the toughest standards in the world, and jobs are still not as plentiful as in the past. But, he says, that little bit of give will go a long way in helping emerging talent in Canada.

The Toronto Youth Caucus was replaced in February 2011 by the Young Emerging Actors Assembly (YEAA). Created for ambitious young performers, the group – founded by Bryn McAuley and Eli Goree – aims to offer more opportunities to aspiring actors.

“I started it to help the 18-year-old version of myself,” says McAuley. She has been a member of ACTRA for more than a decade, joining as a six-year-old.

YEAA aims to open communication with young actors in Toronto, highlight the success and accomplishments of young performers, and host events to bring the community together and introduce them to members of the industry.

Eli Goree and Bryn McAuley, founders of the Young Emerging Actors Assembly (YEAA), photo courtesy of YEAA

McAuley was proud of a recent event where young actors received feedback on their demo reels from decision makers in the field. At the ACTRA conference in late February, McAuley says she saw more young people than ever in attendance. She credits the change in regulations and events YEAA has been hosting for the turnout.

“I saw a lot of young actors at the conference who were getting their third credit on the day, and were very excited about that,” she says. “It’s nice for people to feel embraced by the union instead of intimidated or estranged from it.”

One performer who received his final credit that day was Tony Babcock, a 23-year-old actor from Toronto. He became an ACTRA apprentice in November and thanks to the changes gained full membership in just four months.

“I needed to get to that point where I felt like I was capable of doing the big work,” Babcock says. “I didn’t want to join prematurely, I wanted to wait until I was ready.”

“I feel like I do have a support system in place now, like I do have them looking out for me,” he says.

Vanessa Broze, a 27-year-old ACTRA apprentice in Toronto, is working towards her final credit.

She says she was intimidated in the past by the steep requirements and decided to go the non-union route instead. She became an apprentice this past December after hearing about the changes.

“I thought that the six credits were pretty daunting,” says Broze. “Then they lowered it to three credits and I felt safe joining.”

The Toronto youth group is standing alone in the country at the moment. McAuley says there are no plans for nationwide expansion but would gladly talk with anyone interested in starting a group within their own chapter.

Right now YEAA is focused on promoting themselves to the community in Toronto.  “It’s still quite underground,” McAuley says. “We have a huge percentage of our demographic to still reach.”

Many young performers rely heavily on non-union projects when starting out. A change made to include degrees and certificates from post-secondary institutions as credits helps cut back on that need. The goal is to move new actors closer to ACTRA membership while steering them away from non-union productions.

Karen Woolridge, public relations for ACTRA Toronto, says the initiative helps protect new actors. Woolridge was frustrated watching students come out of institutions and walk into non-union work because they were convinced it would help their career. She says the result was “a whole resume of non-union work that no one respects.”

Broze was initially advised to pursue non-union roles to help break into the industry. She says she had some great experiences working non-union, sufromch as meeting her fiancé, a cinematographer on her first project. However, she also had bad experiences.

Babcock also found non-union work a mixed blessing. “It was a learning experience, there were some up’s and down’s,” he says. Babcock recognizes the need for young actors to take on roles that present themselves and says that kind of work is fine as a starting point, but not as a career.

Broze agrees joining the union is necessary to pursue acting as a serious profession. “Some people are just happy to work even if it’s free,” she says. “You almost feel like you’re paying your dues when you’re a young actor doing that, and that’s okay, but hey, you can’t keep doing that forever.”

Executive Director Gregor Ash addresses AFF audience – All photos courtesy Chris Gerwosky

By Emma Brown

For thousands of people in the entertainment industry, the Atlantic Film Festival (AFF) is a huge ten day celebration drawing the year’s best films from across Canada and the around world.

For Gregor Ash, the executive director and the face of the AFF, it’s the best job in Atlantic Canada.

Ash, who joined the festival as a volunteer more than 20 years ago, was drawn to the job by a life long love of movies.  He grew up in Newfoundland and became a devoted movie lover at a young age. The festival takes place each year in Halifax.

“We didn’t have a movie theatre in town,” remembers Ash. “So every Sunday afternoon one of the local bars would break out an old 16mm and play whatever old classics they could get their hands on.”

He recalls afternoons spent watching old Errol Flynn swashbucklers, a variety of Abbott and Costello comedies, and classic Hollywood suspense films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  But it wasn’t until Ash was a teen and saw the movie Zulu Dawn, about the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana between the British imperial army and the native Zulu warriors, that he realized movies could do more than entertain, they could stir a person’s sense of moral outrage.  “My grandfather was an old Empire Loyalist,” says Ash. “And he used to sing Rule Britannia to me when I was a kid.  But watching Zulu Dawn I lost my love affair with the British Empire.”

Lia Rinaldo became the festival director in 2001.  Like Ash, it was Rinaldo’s love of movies that led her to the AFF, where she has spent the last 20 years happily combining work with pleasure. With the help of seven other people, she selects the films the festival will showcase.  Rinaldo estimates the group watches over 1,500 movies every year before they narrow their final list down to between 175-250 films. The process is an arduous one that keeps the group extremely busy. “We research year round, travel to other events and then spend from May to August watching as many as we can together as a group,” says Rinaldo.

Although the AFF is an international festival, it has a strong commitment to local talent and every year it seeks to provide a platform for the finest films from Atlantic Canada. “There is so much talent here on the East Coast. We’re pretty lucky. We focus about a third of our program annually on the region and the community is very supportive of their home grown talent –  there are always full houses,” says Rinaldo.

Carsten Knox is the special issues editor for The Coast, a Halifax newspaper. He covers the AFF for the paper each year.  What impresses Knox most about the festival is the excitement it generates for local talent. “You’ve got to get tickets early for anything that was shot in the region – full length or shorts – as those screenings sell out first,” he says.

Laura Dawe is an independent filmmaker from Halifax whose film Light is the Day, debuted at the AFF last year.  The film was made in 20 days with a crew of 11 people for just over $15,000. “Everyone worked long, sweating, swearing, smiling hours for free. So, we kept the overhead low,” Dawe says. Most of the money used to make the film came from friends and other people in their community, while local bands donated money raised from shows and music for the film’s soundtrack.  Talking about the festival’s role in supporting her film debut last year, Dawe was incredibly enthusiastic.

“AFF premiered Light and I can never thank them enough. They viewed it at a really early stage, but they saw potential and trusted us to deliver.  There is nowhere else in the world I would have wanted to unveil the movie.  Everyone with the festival was just beyond helpful,” she says. “Also, the opening night party was at Citadel Hill and I’ve always wanted to get way too wasted on free vodka in there so – check.”

Ash remembers the night well. “We screened the opening film in three cinemas, and then about 2,000 people attended the party afterwards.  We had a big tent, but we couldn’t afford to put a floor down.So the tent is on this parade square, in the middle of this historic fort – but people just partied.  The next day they posted pictures of their shoes on Facebook, covered in mud, and some with broken heels.”

The support that Dawe received from the festival had a huge impact in terms of generating publicity and getting the word out about her film. “Getting into the AFF got me onto the cover of The Coast, which, in Halifax is like getting on to the cover of Vanity Fair, or so I’ve always thought,” says Dawe.  The festival is always happy to help artists whenever possible. Still, they don’t have the resources to fly in as many filmmakers as they’d like, particularly given the rising costs of films. “One of the things we can control is how we treat people and the kind of experience they have with us,” Ash says.

Unfortunately, times have not been easy.  Compared to the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals, Ash says the AFF attracts a significantly smaller audience which means less money generated by tickets sales.

In her capacity as festival director, Rinaldo says, “money is a constant cause of stress in the cultural non-profit world and budgets are at the mercy of so many varying factors from year to year.”  A shaky economy is one of those factors.

“The last few years have been difficult for art organizations, because the recession has really affected corporate sponsorship,” says Ash.  But despite hard times, the festival remains dedicated to promoting artistic talent at home and around the world.

“It can be a tough industry but it has at its core a soul which is giving creative voice to the visions that pop into people’s heads,” says Ash. For a life-long lover of movies, what could be better than being a part of that?

By Henji Milius

More than a century after her birth, Mary Pickford is back in the limelight.  The TIFF Bell Lightbox has a display of memorabilia devoted to the starlet, as well as a mini-film festival.

Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford made the move from stage to screen and was the first film actor to negotiate a million dollar contract with a studio.  She earned a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just three years before her death in 1979.

This first exhibit in the new Canadian Film Gallery at the Lightbox showcases 300 items ranging from a white cotton dress to personalized cutlery all donated from the private collection of a Mississauga film fan on a mission to keep Pickford’s memory alive.

“I want the public to know that she was one of us,” says Rob Brooks, the collection’s owner and president of Bloo & Wite Media Inc., a digital media consulting company. The exhibit opened January 13 and by mid-April nearly 10,000 visitors had viewed the display. Sylvia Frank, director and curator of the reference library at the Lightbox, is expecting interest to continue right up until the close in July. A retrospective of Pickford’s films is also playing until then.

Sweetheart, a musical tribute to Pickford, ran for 17 days in February at the Spadina Museum in Toronto. Written in 1998, and directed by Mimi Mekler, the musical performance was a recreation of Pickford’s tumultuous love life with her three husbands as well as her ambitious career. Composer Dean Burry says the “music is there to tell how she is feeling”.

Mary Pickford in a signed picture - Photo by Henji Milius

Known as “Canada’s sweetheart”, Pickford performed in 193 films from 1909 to 1933.  According to Hugh Munro Neele, curator at the Mary Pickford Library at the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education, “she was able to control her contracts very carefully. She worked with her mother in that respect. Nobody handed those things to her.”

In 1919, Pickford founded a distribution company called United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. The company would serve filmmakers and not the studios, according to Neel’s profile of Pickford on the institute’s website.

Mary Pickford Weekend will be held May 14 and 15 at the TIFF Lightbox and will include a tour of the exhibition and a special screening of My Best Girl (1927),  Pickford’s last silent film.

By Lawrence Dushenski

In 1999, Rosie Dransfeld left behind the northern German city of Hamburg, where the skyline is littered with high church spires and neo-Renaissance architecture still influences the landscape. When she landed in Edmonton, she was met by urban sprawl and the magnificence of the concrete jungle in the far north of Canada.

Standing over six feet tall and with sharp features, Rosie is armed with an edgy personality, a rough German accent and an undeniable fearlessness. These attributes have allowed her to produce several documentary films to rave reviews.

Rosie moved to Canada from Germany in 1999 – All photos courtesy ID: Productions Inc.

The change in scenery has had a significant influence on her work, and her use of a once popular style has catapulted her among the elite independent filmmakers in Canada. Cinéma vérité is rarely used today, but Rosie says it’s the best way to capture all of the elements necessary to tell a story.

“It is a style that I am best at. I think it is the best style for documentaries. This was a popular style of film in the ’60s in Canada, and is a very pure style,” says Rosie from her condo in trendy downtown Edmonton. “The essence is to document what is happening without narration.”

Part of what makes her style intriguing is that the characters tell the story, rather than having a narrator detailing the events on screen. It can make the films much more complicated, while capturing the raw emotion of the characters.

“If you succeed in doing this then it is really powerful. This may be one of the reasons that my film Broke won the Gemini award. People watch it and they realize it is all real, it is all real people. Many broadcasters shy away from this style,” she explains.

The film was one of Rosie’s most successful projects. Set at an inner-city pawnshop in Edmonton, the film follows owner David Woolfson through his journeys with the eclectic clientele that frequent his store. It highlights the lengths that people go to in a time of need, as they realize that almost everything in life has a price.

The film was shot entirely inside the pawn shop, and brought a largely unknown part of society to life. While it is rare to shoot an entire project in one location, the technique served her well. Broke won the Donald Brittain Award for social/political documentary at the Gemini Awards, and received critical
acclaim in the industry.

Scott Parker, who worked as the editor on Broke, first met Rosie when she was working on another project at his editing studio. They have now worked together on many projects and Parker says he has gained something truly valuable from his experiences with her.

“I have gotten a really good friend out of the deal, which is probably the best thing for me,” Parker explains. “It has been fantastic for me because I prefer to work alone. I don’t work with a director in the room and Rosie is very keen on that.”

Rosie gets to know the characters in her films and gains an understanding of the story that she is going to tell before she begins filming. This allows her to stand back on the set and let the characters tell the story. Her attention to detail originates from her work in Germany, and it has translated well into the Canadian film industry.

One of the first people that she worked with in Canada was Andrew Johnson, now the senior producer of documentaries for the CBC News Network. At the time, Johnson was working for Rough Cuts, a weekly CBC documentary series, and commissioned Rosie to create a project about Alberta and the perception of Albertans across Canada. The result was Crash Course Alberta, a film about what it means to be an Albertan.

[pullquote]“She has an eye for the odd, the quirky, the humourous but also the marginalized.”
- Andrew Johnson, CBC[/pullquote]

“She has her own perspective on things and a kind of fearless rigour to her view on social reality and issues,” explains Johnson. “She was someone who thought that things were pretty wonderful in Alberta, but she discovered that there was a lot of animosity between the East and West in Canada. She decided to explore it and she met a lot of interesting people. She did it with humour, but with her unique point of view.”

Beaver Man, the first documentary Rosie made with her production company, ID: Productions Inc. was also bought by Johnson.

“It was another film of her understanding Canada,” he says. “It was about a guy who was obsessed with beavers, and it was about beaver culture, the animal in Canadian culture. This man tried to highlight the beaver in his life.” It is this type of project that Rosie was passionate about, as the concept of such an infatuation with an animal from an outsider’s perspective captured her attention.

As an immigrant, Rosie’s view of Canadian culture is reflected in her films. “It was really that unique perspective and approach that she brings to things,” Johnson says. “You get a fresh look at somebody … she is from Germany and brings that perspective with her. It is a fresh look, a fresh viewpoint on things that we may take for granted here.”

“There is a fearlessness to her. That whatever situation she goes into, she is not afraid to ask questions that maybe Canadians are too polite to ask,” Johnson says. “She has an eye for the odd, the quirky, the humourous, but also the marginalized.”

Rosie Dransfeld and David Woolfson in his Edmonton pawnshop

Jerry McIntosh, who now manages the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, met Rosie at a film festival in Banff, Alberta. She can be intimidating to some, as she towers over most of her peers and has a sharp edge, but she made an immediate impact on Jerry.

“I was impressed with her. She has a very strong personality and you always know when she is in the room.”

But as others have discovered with Rosie, McIntosh found there is depth behind her rigid exterior.

“Because of her particular perspective, she finds a quirky side in her characters. It is amusing, entertaining and very fresh,” he says. “I am accustomed to working with Canadian filmmakers who are perhaps a bit more purist about our culture – and she’s not. That is very refreshing.”

Rosie’s movies sometimes shock people, but that is often the only way to get a point across when dealing with such sensitive issues.

Sergio Olivares, the cinematographer for Broke and several other of her projects, embraces this approach. “You have to decide who you are going to be. Every time I pick up a camera, I decide to defend human rights. That is why I get along so well with Rosie,” he explains. “She has the ability as a producer to get in there and attach herself to all of these beautiful things, and that is extremely difficult to do in Canada. It works for humanity when she does these projects.”

By Samar Ismail

Filmmaker and creator of Stiffed, Michael Laicini – Photo by Samar Ismail

After their movie was rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival, filmmaker Michael Laicini and producer David Amito felt heartbroken, depressed, and dejected.

Those feelings didn’t last long, as dejection turned to innovation when they decided to start their own film festival strictly for the rejected: Stiffed.

The allusion to TIFF is clear, deliberate, and meant to be in good humour. Born in a moment of misery, their film festival turned out to be a great success and gave others who had been stiffed by TIFF the opportunity to showcase their talents.

“We had these real hopes and fantasies built into TIFF accepting our film,” says Amito. “When they didn’t, when we got that standard issue TIFF rejection letter, it was really heartbreaking.” The idea of creating their own film festival was like a bolt of lightning, says Laicini. “The idea just sort of hit us.”

“What’s stopping us from showing our movie in Toronto – during the Toronto film festival and maybe even grabbing some attention away from that festival in the process? And from that thought process, we invented this film festival,” he explains.

Originally, the intention was to only screen their movie but the idea quickly evolved into something bigger. “It occurred to us that we could make this a bigger deal,” says Laicini. “There’s hundreds of people in our exact same position who just got their rejection letters.”

Laicini and Amito wanted Stiffed to be an avenue for other filmmakers rejected by TIFF to screen their movies because they know how difficult it is to break into the film industry. “You kind of already have to be a somebody to be accepted into the Toronto film festival,” says Laicini. “And it’s not always fair.”

In its first year, Stiffed was held at the Camera Bar in downtown Toronto on the last night of TIFF and featured 13 short films of different genres. One film was by Eva Ziemsen, a Humber film professor and Laicini’s former teacher. Her documentary, A Conversation with Lars von Trier, won the Stiffed Spirit Award. Ziemsen faced difficulties in the making of her documentary because main subject and namesake Lars von Trier would not agree to be interviewed – but Ziemsen persisted until she got one. Perseverance in the face of rejection resonates very clearly with the Stiffed’s message.

Ziemsen felt honoured to receive the Spirit Award and says with a laugh, “it just goes to show that it’s a very small industry and the people who you teach are the ones who are going to be letting you into their film festival.”

Laicini and Amito “didn’t pout, they didn’t take it as a negative. They created something new which probably is going to have a lot of momentum and support because they’re not alone,” Ziemsen says. “There’s many people who are rejected and to kind of celebrate the people who were not included but deserve to be shown, I think that’s such a positive outcome out of a rejection.”

Ziemsen shares that “never give up” mantra: “I think it’s really important for any filmmaker who is rejected from something to know that it’s not the end of the world – and sometimes being rejected makes you go much bigger and better than you thought you could. So sometimes a rejection will make you grow and think of a more innovative way to do something than had you been accepted.”

Photo courtesy Stiffed Film Festival

Still, Amito and Laicini respect the larger festival and made it very clear that Stiffed was not in any way meant to insult TIFF, nor do they want to be an adversary. “The reality is, we would say that if a filmmaker is starting out, there’s no way we can say just submit to Stiffed, you should submit to TIFF,” Amito says. “I mean, it’s a huge festival and it stands to give you a lot of exposure, let’s not dance around that. That’s why TIFF is great. So submit to TIFF, it’s just that if you don’t get accepted, there’s another avenue to look at.”

“We don’t care about trumping the Toronto Film Festival or being more popular or being better or any of those things,” says Laicini. “It’s not really a competition for us. How we like to look at Stiffed is not as a competitor but an extension of their film festival.”

A dream come true for Laicini would be if TIFF one day reached out to Stiffed as a sponsor. “Although we play with being combatant, antagonistic with Toronto, we ultimately just want to be their little brother,” jokes Laicini.

Laicini would like for the impact of Stiffed to be “Rockyesque. It has the quality of the underdog, as in it doesn’t matter how many times someone puts me down or says no or says that maybe I’m not good enough or whatever, I’m not going to let that stop me from doing what I want to do.”

Optimism was essential to their success. Rejection is already hard enough; Amito and Laicini only had around a month to organize the entire festival.

“It was a lot of hassle to find the venue and finally to find submissions. In under four weeks we had to put so much word out there to get people to know that there’s this other film festival,” says Laicini.“We paid for a ton of advertising; we threw posters up all over the city.”

They plastered eye-catching and iconic posters throughout Toronto. Vancouver-based graphic designer Chris von Szombathy brought the poster to life, and said it “was going to be one of those things that will definitely leave an impression. No doubt about it.” Von Szombathy says the provocative image – the CN tower and two strategically placed film reels – left a positive impression on most people. The reception was “really positive and definitely got a good laugh. I think most people really got the humour in it really, really quickly.”

In the end, Laicini and Amito ended up $2,000 in debt but they hope to attract corporate sponsorships as the festival grows. “The intention is to make it bigger, to make it more exposed and to reach more people,” says Amito. Other goals for the upcoming festival are to have it run for two days during the last weekend of TIFF, to showcase more movies from different categories, and if time and resources allow, showcase a feature length film.

Even though Stiffed is a film festival for the rejected, they also had to stiff others as well which was difficult.

“We were fully aware of the fact that we probably had to turn away people from our film festival at the end of the day and what that meant for us,” says Laicini. He explained that being rejected from a film festival does not mean you’re a bad filmmaker or your movie wasn’t good, but is an issue of practicality.

Amito explains “the reality of the situation is that we can only screen ‘X’ number of films because of the time allocations that we have, and every film festival will have to make rejections. Although in our case it is exceptionally hard to reject because we are a film festival for the rejected.”

Ultimately, Amito says “the impact of Stiffed is just to send out that kind of energy, of just make it, make it, make it, go, go, go, whether you’re rejected or accepted, just keep going. That’s the impact that we hope to get and the more exposure that we can get as a film festival, the more I think we can get that message out there.”

“The film industry is a bitter, cold, cynical place, and it’s nice to have little moments of optimism,” says Laicini. “And that’s what I think Stiffed was. It was a moment of optimism.”