Lost Face wins CIFF’s Alberta Spirit Award
A film based on a Jack London story about a power struggle between a European fur thief and his native captors took first prize at the Calgary International Film Festival’s Alberta Spirit gala on Sunday evening.
Lost Face, based on the title story of London’s 1910 collection, is a violent, ambitious 14-minute short shot west of Calgary by Australian native Sean Meehan.
Rachel Feldbloom-Wood, a juror and grants administrator for Bell Media’s BravoFACT program and a juror for Alberta Spirit, praised the film for its “exemplary execution on all creative levels and taut, flawless storytelling.”
Meehan, who lives in Los Angeles, put together a stellar cast for the film, including Alberta actors Gerald Auger, Michelle Thrush, Morris Birdyellowhead and Montreal’s Martin Dubreuil.
Meehan said he came to Alberta to shoot because he needed snow and a large indigenous cast. He teamed up with Joe Media’s Matt Gillespie, who was associate producer of Lost Face.
“They jumped in and helped us,” Meehan said. “We just kept asking and asking and asking and everybody just kept delivering. It was amazing.”
Auger, who has starred in Hell on Wheels and Into the West, helped recruit some of the other actors, including award-winning Blackstone actress Michelle Thrush.
Meehan said at first he wasn’t sure if the indigenous actors would want to participate, given London’s story is about “white people tricking the culture that lives here.” In the story, fur thief Subienkow is captured by a local tribe and attempts to strike a bargain with the leader to escape the long, torturous death that met his cohort.
“The cast that did it saw it as a necessary story to tell and that it was what happened over and over again,” Meehan says.
This year’s 10 Alberta Spirit entries seemed to be defined by ambition. Jesse Foster’s surreal, well-crafted Anxiety #5 was given honourable mention Sunday night.
But the films ran the gamut, from Levi Holwell’s harrowing and allegorical Metanoia, to Katrina Beatty’s post-Second World War pilot drama Lift to Benjamin Musgrave’s “Prairie musical” Late Harvest and Kelton Stepanowich’s beautifully shot drama Gods Acre, about an isolated aboriginal man losing his traditional lands to a flood.
There were also a number of documentaries. Dominique Keller offered the sweet, crowd-pleasing Grandma Learns to Drive and Alexandra Lazarowich directed the powerful Cree Code Talker, about Albertan Charles Tomkins’ service as a “code talker” in the Second World War.
Jaimie Stewart and Voytek Jarmula profiled a longtime Calgary theatre actor in Stephen Hair in Passion, while Kelly Wolfert chronicled an Alberta country singer’s first performance at the Grand Ole Opry in Brett Kissel: Stepping Inside the Circle.