A SLICE OF HIGH SCHOOL
Hoops film finds humour in the mundane
Ted Stenson had a powerful sense of deja vu when he walked into Queen Elizabeth High School for the first time in 17 years.
This is not surprising since the filmmaker spent four years at the northwest school before graduating in 2002. But this went beyond the simple stirring of high school memories.
“It oddly felt like I had been there a week before,” says Stenson. “It was funny. It was definitely a trip. Partly, it was because nothing has changed really.”
The fact that Queen Elizabeth has not seen much of an esthetic upgrade in 17 years may not delight current or future students. But it proved beneficial for Stenson. He had returned to his old high school as part of a scouting expedition for his directorial debut, titled Events Transpiring Before, During and After a High School Basketball Game.
While Queen Elizabeth has been rechristened Middleview for the film and the Queen Elizabeth Knights have become the more dorky sounding Middleview Ducks, much of the film's action or lack thereof was directly inspired by Stenson's time at the school as a less-than-gifted athlete. While writing the script, his memories of Queen Elizabeth helped form a “rough geography” of the film.
So Queen Elizabeth became the main setting and did not require much set dressing to transform into a Calgary high school circa 1999. While the film takes place at the tail end of the 1990s, Stenson did not want to make a nostalgia-fuelled period piece with obvious shout-outs to the decade. So the generic look was good.
Events Transpiring may be most notable for what it's not. Yes, it's a high-school comedy, but Stenson was careful to avoid the cliches of that genre. Yes, it has high-school basketball as a fuzzy focal point, but the first-time filmmaker didn't want it to fall into any of those under-dogs-triumph-against-the-odds tropes either.
Hoosiers it is not. If anything, Stenson sees Events Transpiring as an “anti-sports, anti-high school movie” that plays against the conventions of those genres.
“I played a lot of sports and I definitely don't remember any thrilling moments,” says Stenson, who will conduct Q&AS during in-cinema screenings of the film Saturday and Oct. 2 as part of the Calgary International Film Festival. “I think the average experience is a lot more mundane. I wanted to capture that and hopefully portray that in a funny way.”
As you may have guessed by now, there is a decidedly deadpan vibe to the comedy of Events Transpiring. The film does include a quasi-inspirational coach played by Calgary born Kim's Convenience star Andrew Phung, but the big game for our less-than-mighty Ducks isn't that big and it plays out on the periphery of the action rather than being the centre of it. Stenson, who is the son of Alberta literary royalty Fred Stenson, has a playwriting degree from the University of Calgary's MFA Theatre Program and his debut film is dialogue-heavy, defined by long shots and an unmoving camera and performed by an ensemble cast made up almost entirely of newcomers. In fact, Stenson says the film could easily become a stage play.
Still, the film's initial inspiration was deeply cinematic. While entering his high school after so many years may have been a bit of a nostalgia trip for Stenson, Events Transpiring did not stem from any strong desire to revisit his years at Queen Elizabeth.
The initial spark for this lowkey comedy came from a far more unusual place. Stenson is a great admirer of Hungarian filmmaker Michael Haneke's harrowing 1994 drama, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. That film involves several seemingly unrelated story fragments that eventually intersect for a violent climax at a bank.
“It's a brutally serious movie about a shooting in a bank,” Stenson says. “The way the movie comes together with all these disparate scenes and characters and you really don't know where it's going and at the end you see all these people end up at the same place. They're all at this bank and one of them is the shooter. And I thought it would be funny to use a structure like that but have it be about a high school and a pathetic team. That was the impetus more than my own experience. I wanted to focus on the banality. ”
Events Transpiring was shot over 15 days in August 2019, with most of the action filmed within the gymnasium and halls of Queen Elizabeth. One of the halls still has a graduation photo of Stenson hanging on it, circa 2002. Except for Phung, the cast had spent very little or no time in front of a camera before this production.
Stenson wanted his characters to look like high-school kids, not actors.
“Honestly, the more inexperienced the cast was the easier it was to work with them,” he says. “I don't if that was just because they didn't have expectations or something. But I was blown away. We did cast a lot of people who had zero film and TV experience. Largely, that was because there is not a huge pool of actors in Calgary and Alberta that can play that age and have agents and stuff. We also wanted to cast people who looked like real people ... But I was amazed.”