Quebecers get exposure at film fest
Canadian filmmakers with feature-length creations in this year’s program tell T’Cha Dunlevy what the internationally renowned festival means to them
The Sundance Film Festival changed everything for YoannKarl Whissell, Anouk Whissell and François Simard.
The Quebec directorial trio, collectively known as Roadkill Superstar (RKSS for short), were virtually unknown when they showed their feature debut Turbo Kid at a midnight screening in 2015 at the festival that Robert Redford built.
“It transformed our career, 100 per cent,” Yoann-Karl said matterof-factly. “It changed our lives. That’s where we met our agent. There’s an international notoriety to Sundance, so it gave a legitimacy to Turbo Kid, which allowed it to go around the world and be sold in over 60 countries.”
Not bad for a madcap, Mad Max and BMX-inspired, blood-soaked romantic comedy.
Monday night at midnight, RKSS will return to Park City, Utah, for the world première of their followup, Summer of ’84.
It’s one of four Canadian features, including three from Quebec, at the U.S.’s biggest independent film festival, which screens 106 features through Jan. 28.
The tale of a suburban teen and his pals who suspect the cop living next door may in fact be a serial killer has all the makings of a movie that could catapult the crew’s career into the stratosphere.
Any similarity to the Netflix smash hit Stranger Things is purely coincidental, RKSS assures.
“We received the pitch in 2015,” Simard explained, “before (the 2017 hit horror film) It and Stranger Things.
“We got scared when those became super popular but we saw that, yes, there is a public for this. It surely helped get the green light for the project.”
Less splatter-ific and with a more serious tone than their first film, Summer of ’84 marks an artistic evolution for the team.
“It’s a nice display of what we can do,” Yoann-Karl said.
Heading into Sundance, the RKSS trio are anxious to unveil their latest work to the world.
“It’s the first time we’ll be showing it, outside of our team,” Anouk said.
“That’s always super stressful and scary. When we showed Turbo Kid (at Sundance), I didn’t hear a thing. I was too nervous.”
Bob Moore knows the power of Sundance to propel a movie onto the world stage.
The EyeSteelFilm producer has accompanied four of the five documentaries the Montreal company has presented at the festival, including this year’s submission, Matthieu Rytz’s environmental clarion call Anote’s Ark.
“I definitely feel the responsibility of getting the most out of the opportunity,” he said.
“It’s such a huge deal, for documentaries in particular. People have world-changing ambitions for docs, and yet the possibility of actually reaching a broader audience is so limited.
“Having a really high-profile event like Sundance championing documentaries, with celebrities tied in and all its cachet — it’s this unique moment where you actually feel documentary is standing shoulder to shoulder with big, sexy Hollywood-style films. So of course you want to take advantage of that.”
A character-driven journey to the island republic of Kiribati, the inhabitants of which are being forced to consider relocating from their millennia-spanning homeland due to rising sea levels, the film was rewarded with a coveted firstFriday night slot, Jan. 19 at Sundance’s prime venue, the Egyptian Theatre. Other screenings follow in the coming week.
Moore and Rytz are on hand to accompany the film, along with other EyeSteelFilm members and Kiribati’s former president Anote Tong, who will take part in an environmental-themed panel discussion hosted by Redford on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s a very personal, emotional story,” Moore said.
“It doesn’t aim to overwhelm you with facts, figures and statistics. In the tradition of a lot of our docs, it’s very character-driven. It’s pure storytelling, telling the next major story around climate change, which is climate migration.”
Ina Fichman has been to Sundance for the past four years, but this is her first time presenting a film at the festival. The Montrealer co-produced Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan’s The Oslo Diaries, a look at secret peace negotiations between a small group of Israelis and Palestinians in 1992.
“Sundance is different because it’s an industry festival,” she said.
“Yes, people do go to Park City, go skiing and go to the movies — the theatres are packed … but like a colleague said, ‘It’s a great place to meet people and screen films.’ As a producer, that’s what you want, and what Sundance is all about.
“I have lots of friends in the American documentary community, and everybody goes to Sundance.”
Fichman met the Israeli directors of The Oslo Diaries at — where else? — Sundance, a few years back.
“After I saw (their 2015 documentary) Censored Voices, I really wanted to work with the filmmaking team.”
Working with Israeli producer Hilla Medalia, Fichman co-ordinated Canadian involvement in the film from Radio-Canada, Quebec funding agency SODEC and the Rogers Documentary Fund.
She also corralled talent from the Quebec film community, including sound designer Sylvain Bellemare (a recent Oscar winner for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival), to work on the project.
To finally bring a film of her own to Sundance is a great feeling, Fichman said.
“It’s really exciting. It’s surreal, in a way. It’s the hype, the pressure. There are so few international documentaries at Sundance — just 12 films. So to be part of that is pretty extraordinary.”
Cuban-Canadian brothers Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso’s first feature Un Traductor is not a documentary, but it is based on real events. Their father was a professor of Russian literature in Cuba in the 1980s, when he was asked to act as a translator for child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster who were sent to his country for medical treatment.
“One thing we talked about is how to make the film relatable to international audiences who were not exposed to the situation,” Rodrigo said, on the phone from Toronto this week. “Even though it happened 30 years ago on an island in political crisis, we still managed to help 20,000 people from a very wealthy country.”
The Sundance Institute was central to developing the project, inviting the brothers to an international writers lab, an editing lab and a sound lab at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch.
“Every time we had a new draft, they’d send us notes,” said Sebastián, who co-wrote the script with fellow Canadian Film Centre grad and Un Traductor producer Lindsay Gossling.
“And every time we had a new cut, they would give us feedback. They’ve been following us all along on this project, on all technical and creative aspects of it.”
Although the siblings never had a film at Sundance before, Rodrigo showed his 2012 short For Dorian at Sundance’s offshoot Slamdance.
“It’s really fun,” he said of the latter event, which runs parallel to the main event. “It’s a very small festival, about filmmakers, for filmmakers. After that, I was a programmer for them for three years. One of their rules is that you have to be a working filmmaker to program for them.”
Quebec director Pascal Plante is another Slamdance veteran. After presenting three short films at the festival from 2013 to 2017, he returns with his feature debut, the punk-rock romance Les faux tatouages, which won the award for best Canadian film at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma in October and is off to the Berlin International Film Festival in February.
“(Slamdance) is similar to my film,” he said. “A bit punk, alternative, anti-glamour. It exists as a counterpoint to Sundance. It’s about discovery. The features competition is all first films with limited budgets (of US$1 million or less). It’s run by a young team, nothing fancy or extravagant — just good films.”
People have world-changing ambitions for docs, and yet the possibility of actually reaching a broader audience is so limited.