U of R students keen to keep making movies
While young filmmakers are optimistic about future, others are not so confident
Many believe the provincial government killed Saskatchewan’s film industry when it eliminated the film employment tax credit. Almost seven years later, we talk to a few industry “survivors.” Last of a four-part series.
REGINA Luke Halyk and Joel Kereluke were in Grade 11 when they entered a short film in a not-so-little festival down Highway 16.
Halyk, from Foam Lake, and Kereluke, from Wadena, submitted their film Laundroman to the Yorkton Film Festival in 2015.
It was one of four nominees in the Drama category.
“We weren’t allowed to enter the student category because … we weren’t undergrad students,” said Halyk. “So because of that, we had to fight in the big dog category.”
It was “really exciting,” said Kereluke, “because we were competing with established international filmmakers. We were very honoured.”
They had decided the year before to study film in university and pursue it as a career.
Their nomination came after a three-month crunch time in which they shot and completed the film. It featured Halyk’s grandparents, Alex and Cecile Halyk, as a couple in a financial crisis.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” said Luke Halyk.
In November 2014, they decided to make the film for a February 2015 submission deadline.
“We didn’t realize how impossible that time span would normally be for anyone that’s going to make a 20-minute film,” said Halyk.
Theirs was one of 86 productions nominated from 211 submissions.
Halyk and Kereluke, now 21 years old, each started making movies when they were in Grade 3 or 4.
When they met in 2011, they established a YouTube channel, Blister Cinema, with their friend and fellow filmmaker, Jacob Farrell.
Now fourth-year students at the University of Regina, Halyk is on track to receive his bachelor of film production in June. Kereluke — a two-time Saskatchewan Independent Film Awards nominee — will have a few electives to finish up after that.
Their minor in arts administration should help their career path.
The two friends plan to continue making movies together, and want to make it a business.
“We’re going to continue to do creative projects and commercial work hopefully and, I think the plan is at some point, we definitely want to make some bigger scale projects as well,” said Halyk.
“It would be awesome to do a web series or to end up doing a feature film someday.”
“And there’s some really nice grants available in Saskatchewan for larger-form projects,” added Kereluke, with funding available through Telefilm, Canada Council for the Arts and Creative Saskatchewan.
The latter replaced the film employment tax credit, which was cut in the government’s 2012-13 budget in March 2012.
When Halyk and Kereluke started seriously making films, “It had already happened; it was already the aftermath. So we never really got to see what it was like when the tax credit was in place and everything,” said Halyk.
Receiving funding from any source would provide “more money than we’ve ever been used to,” said Kereluke.
They are confident in their ability to make a living.
“Our upbringing has been kind of non-traditional and we’ve kind of learned to fend for ourselves on an online platform.
“And there’s so many other avenues you can take,” Kereluke added, including commercial and advertising work.
Not everyone is so optimistic about the future of filmmaking in Saskatchewan.
“It’s like the universe is expanding and we’re in the same spot, because these other places are getting bigger and stronger and driving more people and more series and becoming more established,” said Saskatoon-based director/producer Antonio Hrynchuk.
The Manitoba government refunds producers up to 65 per cent of labour expenses, or 30 per cent of their total in-province spending. The producer of a $2-million production could get a tax credit of between $1.17-million and $1.69-million.
The Alberta Media Fund provides grants of up to $7.5 million.
Creative Saskatchewan’s investment criteria — granting a maximum of 30 per cent of eligible expenses, with a $600,000 cap per project — makes sense for productions budgeted at $2 million or less.
Before 2012, “In Saskatchewan, our bread and butter was kind of like the under $10-million budget, between $1 million and $7 million or even less,” said Dan Crozier, a props master whose industry work is now mostly in other provinces.
Creative Saskatchewan offered $2.66 million in grants exclusively to screen-based media projects, in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2018. Another $1.7 million was shared among all art forms, including screen-based media.
Tim Thurmeier, a Regina-based freelance editor, is skeptical about rebuilding the industry, “because even if you bring back the tax credit say today, you’d have to start figuring out how to get people to come back here. Because it got taken away so easily, how do you convince people it’s back now?”