Auteur’s funding failure has silver lining
Big buzz at festival for Canadian filmmaker’s coming-of-age yarn, The Sleeping Giant
CANNES — To hear Andrew Cividino tell it, having funding fall apart on his first feature was quite possibly the best thing that could have happened to it.
The filmmaker was in Thunder Bay, Ont., two summers ago preparing to shoot The Sleeping Giant when the money dried up. But rather than call it quits, he shot a pared-down version under the same title. That film won the Youth Jury Prize at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, and was later named one of the year’s top 10 Canadian shorts by the Toronto International Film Festival.
The short used a more experimental and impressionistic method that informed the feature version — though rest assured, it’s not an “experimental” film. “If we hadn’t made the short first, I wouldn’t have had the courage to try the approach ... that we did,” Cividino says.
He’s discussing his film at a beachside café in Cannes, where The Sleeping Giant screened in the Critics’ Week sidebar to positive reviews and appreciative crowds.
At its heart this is a simple story of a coming-of-age summer in northern Ontario. But the specifics — glorious cinematography that illuminates the northern scenery; an equally lush score and soundscape; and spot-on performances from a mix of first-time and more seasoned actors — all conspire to make this one of the best films to screen at Cannes this year.
“When you land on this stage, you know that people come to these screenings with their knives sharpened and ready,” says Cividino. But the blades have remained sheathed. The biggest letdown audiences have had is learning that the youthfullooking director is 31. “I think they think I’m 22 ... like a wunderchild or something.” Perhaps Xavier Dolan has spoiled Cannes crowds into thinking we’re a nation of early bloomers.
His trio of teenage stars are the real deal, however. Nick Serino and Reece Moffett are cousins from Thunder Bay. Their grandmother joined the cast as their grandmother; in the film, she is hilariously more concerned with the boys’ language than the fact that they smoke and drink. Jackson Martin plays their new friend Adam; the actor hails from London, Ont., and his character is also from away, a child who (like Cividino) spends his summers in the North.
“I had my summer friends,” the director says of spending one season out of four in Thunder Bay. “You grew up together, but with different expectations.” The Sleeping Giant is in many ways a paean to his youth.
“If I’d had the money this was going to be set in the ’90s and be more of a love letter to the last generation that grew up without constant technology,” he says.
Cividino has several projects planned, including a feature version of his 2011 short We Ate the Children Last, based on a short story by Yann Martel. He’d also like to try his hand at horror. “I think there’s something about the naturalism, the spontaneity, the immediacy of how we did The Sleeping Giant that would lend itself to that genre,” he says.