Take One (Dec 2003 - Mar 2004)

py TOM MCSORLEY 22 In thinking about a list of the Top 10 debut fiction features since 1968 fr troubled, utterly indomitable Canadian feature film industry, it is appropriate the perpetually borrow the title © of Peter Harcourt’s seminal article comparing Gilles Groulx’s Le Chat dans le sac and Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Good-Bye, two remarkable first features that arrived four years earlier. In “1964: The Beginning of a Beginning,” Harcourt identifies the cultural and political implications of the start, however accidental and clandestine it may have been (given both films were intended to be documentaries), of something vitally important to a still very young Canadian cinematic culture: the possibilities of creating relevant, recognizably Canadian fiction feature films. A lot has changed in the almost four decades since 1964, Canada’s cinematic annus mirabilus. Arguably the most crucial change was the opening—for—business of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC) in the spring of 1968. Now known as Telefilm Canada, the CFDC was founded—in the finest Canadian traditions of the “mixed economy”—to invest public money in a fledgling private sector Canadian film industry to create, with varying degrees of success, a reasonably constant level of production of Canadian feature films. Since then film festivals and cinematheques have arrived to increase exposure of Canadian film, modest alternate distribution circuits have come onstream, independent film co-ops have burgeoned from coast to coast, film schools and training eentres have been established, specialty television has arrived and production studios have emerged in several Canadian cities. Happily—and unfortunately—a lot has remained the same. There is still much promise and possibility in the arrival of new filmmaking talent. There have been and continue to be great beginnings. There remains, too, however, the reality of Hollywood dominance of Canadian distribution and exhibition, continued audience indifference (at least in English-speaking Canada) and a popular film media whose subconscious, to quote Wim Wenders, has long ago been colonized by the Yanks. (Ben Mulroney, are you readpe this? No, I didn’t think so.) DECEMBER 2003 — MARCH FARE) this particular Top 10 list, initiated by the Canadian Film entre on the 10th anniversary of its Feature Film Project and, coinei entally, the 35th birthday of Telefi Canada, ention on the best debut fiction feat untry since money first beg Film ecuti focuses its duced in this co > ( ae entre executive db gin to become re consistent in te production activity with respect to feature films.” Moreover, in any press of list-making, Clarkson emphasizes, there is that inevitable “combination of pleasing thoughts about what's included and the disappointment of what's not. For example, we should make special mention of three films in particular that came very close: Michel Brault’s Entre la mer et Peau douce (1968), Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden (1997) and Don McKellar’s Last Night (1998), which I consider one of the best debut films ever. Whatever the frustrations of exclusion, and lists are always reveal the rich traHopefully, this list will sts at the Toronto to some degree arbitrary, this one 4 dition of first features in Canada generate, ‘E:: Canada’s 10 I International Film Festival in 14 demand to see these films an to think about them again.” A is begin at the beginning. Again. s\ : S s? oe _ 993, a renewed timulate people Background image from The Grey Fox.