‘It’s time to hear everyone’s stories’
The movie industry both in Hollywood and Canada appears to be on the brink of radical change, as it vows to end its historic domination by white males.
Gender equity and diversity are the watchwords, as everybody from the Oscar-awarding Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to Canada’s National Film Board pledge to shake up how movies get made, who gets to be in them and who wins the shiny gold prizes for them.
The NFB recently put its money where its mouth is by committing to have at least half of its productions directed by women and half of all production spending allocated to films directed by women. This goal will be achieved by 2019, the NFB said, and the promise can be verified: budget allocations will be posted on the board’s website.
This is impressive stuff, and it is to be applauded, even if the issues and promises are anything but new. A lot of this change speaks of better days to come, or “jam tomorrow,” as the White Queen offers Alice in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the literary classic soon to be a major motion picture with an all-white lead cast.
What impresses me more are people who just get on with the job of making movies more democratic, rather than waiting for big studios and government-funded agencies to get their acts together.
I’m thinking of groups like We Make Movies Canada, the defiantly Canuck offshoot of We Make Movies, a 4,000-member Los Angeles collective of indie filmmakers, actors and screenwriters started in 2009. The Canadian chapter, WMM-CA for short, commenced in 2012 in Toronto thanks to the efforts of Newfoundland actor Michael Coady (TV’s Republic of Doyle), who serves as executive director. The idea behind WMM-CA, which has 850 active members and an online community of 3,500, is to bring together people from all aspects of film and from a wide spectrum of race, age, gender and experience to make productions happen.
These are people who just want to create, without waiting for the phone to ring or an email to arrive from some larger entity.
The group meets monthly at whatever Toronto club, community centre or lounge they can arrange or finagle, for workshops to share ideas and skills.
“We don’t have a specific mandate other than to make the films that we want to see,” says WMM-CA executive member Laura Kyswaty, a Toronto actor whose resumé includes the films Fvoyer and End of the Line and the TV series Dual Suspects.
“These are indie films that focus on story and character, that lead you somewhere. Maybe they don’t have a million-dollar special effects budget, but they can affect you just as much.”
Funding comes mainly through a Kickstarter campaign and 50/50 draws, rather than government or corporate sponsors.
“Writers submit their scripts in advance and we choose some screenplays to be read aloud,” Kyswaty says, describing the monthly workshops.
“We cast from our databases close to what the characters are and depending on who’s coming out that night. It gives the filmmakers a chance to hear it and then we moderate feedback so that they get feedback in the moment from the people in the room. They get a chance to hear their script come to life, and we don’t charge anything for that.”
The process has had the happy development of attracting many women, who are a big part of Slate One, the name for the first collection of micro-budget Canadian short films produced by the WMMCA community.
Slate One was the result of a screenplay competition, where three shorts were selected for production funding from a field of several dozen.
Two of the three were directed by women: gender preference comedy Taco by Jillian Tredenick and Sarah Monahan, and sexual confusion laugher The Birds and the Knees, by Amanda Terfloth.
The third film, Matthew Macfadzean’s drama Dorothy’s Secret, stars three women ranging in age from 20s to 80s who recreate the bittersweet memories of an aging prostitute, who is played by Marye Barton.
“How many films have their protagonist as an 80-year-old woman?” Kyswaty says.
The three films are scheduled to screen March 30 at a premiere party at the Hard Rock Café at Dundas Square. The event, running from 7 p.m. to midnight, will also feature four shorts developed through the WMM process: Jake Fisher’s Our Scattered Seeds; Sam Coyle’s The Change; Serge Kushnier’s Will and Sam Ingraffia’s Silent Night in Mun- cie. (The public is welcome at the event; tickets are $12 at the door.)
These seven films all had significant female involvement, Kyswaty says, but while gender parity is a decided bonus, the real aim of WMM is just to give everybody a chance to realize their moviemaking dream. The group hopes to expand into making features, as the L.A. chapter has done.
“It’s time to hear everyone’s stories,” she says.
“All the stories that are out there, whether they’re written by men or women or from whatever group, let’s just hear them rather than pigeonhole them. And let’s hear stories from voices we haven’t heard from as much.” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column runs Fridays.