Valley Below picks up saga of Abbatoir’s low-key drama
Having two films screen at the Cannes Film Festival before you have reached 30 is no small feat for a young writer-director.
But for Calgary’s Kyle Thomas, filming the Alberta-shot shorts The Post and Not Far From the Abbatoir were a means to an end, a way to build toward what most filmmakers ultimately want: the chance to make a full-length feature.
“It’s always the dream,” says Thomas, taking a break from shooting his debut feature The Valley Below in Drumheller. “Maybe not for everyone, but for me it was. It was like, ‘Maybe one day, instead of a four-day shoot, it will be a 20-day shoot.’ You’re always inching toward that. It was the right time and the right project to bridge the gap to the feature world.”
In 2012, Thomas’s short film Not Far From the Abbatoir screened in Cannes as part of Telefilm’s Not Short on Talent program. It was a spare and moving character study about a drifting small-town slaughterhouse worker named Warren (Kris Demeanor) who falls for a quirky painter named Ada (Mandy Stobo). Thomas’s next film, The Post, a period piece about a young RCMP officer assigned to a remote Alberta location during the Second World War, screened in Cannes earlier this year, as well. Both years, Thomas went to the prestigious French festival as a representative of Calgary’s North Country Cinema, a collective of filmmakers who have produced a large number of successful shorts.
This no doubt gave Thomas a bit of a leg up when it came to Telefilm’s new Micro-Budget Production Program competition, which selected eight projects from across Canada to fund. The object of the fund is to get more low-budget films — costs could not exceed $250,000 in total — made by young homegrown directors.
As part of the project, Thomas’s pitch was put forward by the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers after a jury that included Gary Burns, Michelle Wong and John Kerr chose it from the other contenders.
So, for the past week, Thomas has been in the Alberta’s Badlands and in the town of Drumheller with a crew of 12 and $120,000 in Telefilm funding for The Valley Below. Because the action takes place over a year, the crew will return to the location in November for some colder climes. The film continues the story of Warren and Ada, who we meet roughly five years later from the narrative of Abbatoir. They now have a child and a troubled relationship.
But while Thomas may be excited about having a bigger canvas to play with, he hasn’t totally abandoned the language and style of short films.
The Abbatoir story is just one of four vignettes that could stand alone as short films.
All four seem to be based on deceptively simple storylines.
One is about an ambitious RCMP officer (Alejandro Rae) negotiating the poli-
Some characters are being forced into change, while others are resisting it
KYLE THOMAS
tics of his job. Another is about a high school graduate (Mikaela Cochrane) en route to college who must deal with her older boyfriend (Joe Perry), while the fourth is about a taxidermist (Stephen Bogaert) with a crumbling marriage.
The stories, which all take place in Drumheller, eventually intertwine, recalling the format of Robert Altman’s 1993 classic Short Cuts.
“All of these characters are either forced into change or are in stagnancy, or fighting stagnancy or fighting change,” Thomas says. “It’s all about moving forward and staying stuck. There’s this idea of stagnancy that runs through all these stories. Some characters are being forced into change, while others are resisting it. I think that’s a common theme in small towns.”
Beautifully shot and acted, the 17-minute Abbatoir was a low-key, slice-of-life drama that recalled John Cassavetes in its realistic dialogue and Springsteen songs in its astute portrayal of small-town malaise and desperation.
When Thomas first approached Demeanor — who reprises his role alongside Stobo — to play Warren, he gave him a documentary about Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt as homework.
“Townes Van Zandt’s songs are very similar to the tone of Kyle’s pieces,” says Demeanor.
“They are kind of about the struggle of existence, the fact that being alive ain’t easy. But we try and we’re sometimes ill-equipped and sometimes ill-prepared and sometimes we are mired in it and sometimes we find states of transcendence.”
Demeanor is a wellknown singer-songwriter and Calgary’s poet laureate, but not the most seasoned of actors.
Not that anyone would guess that from his subtle and nuanced performance as Warren in Abbatoir.
“The skill involved is to really not to overplay, to try to be clear, but try to be natural and allow the character to do the work,” Demeanor says.
“... One of the things I enjoyed about Abbatoir and what I enjoyed about this script is that it’s not super reliant on narrative. It’s held together by tone and theme and by the beauty of the visuals that offset this strange set of desperation of despair and loss in people’s lives in all these intersecting stories.”