Aboriginal film fest resurrects 'dead' feature

It may not be a zombie movie, but a film on the program of next week's eighth annual Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival carries a certain back-from-the-dead vibe.

Not to be harsh, but Juliana and the Medicine Fish was a feature film project that was presumed dead in October 2006. That was when filmmaker Jeremy Torrie had to pull the plug on the Rob Schneider movie because "we just ran out of money."

"We couldn't incur any more expenses. We had spent quite a bit of money as it was," Torrie says.

Torrie realized one way to make some money on the production was to piece together a shorter half-hour drama from the existing footage "which we called a half-hour drama pilot for APTN. The movie featured 12-year-old Juliana as she moves to her dad's tourist lodge after the death of her mother and devises a plan to catch a legendary muskie at a fishing derby with the help of an Ojibway guide (Gordon Tootoosis).

"Creating that pilot would enable us to collect a tax credit, based on the labour that was incurred, so we could pay people back," Torrie says.

"Obviously we weren't able to pay everything back, but at least we're expecting to pay cast and crew back. Some have been paid but some haven't."

Conspicuously absent from the half-hour version of the film is its erstwhile star Schneider, who plays the father of the film's titular heroine Julianna, played by young actress Jessica Amlee.

"We cut Rob Schneider's part entirely out of the film," Torrie says. "He wasn't willing to co-operate with us (on the shorter incarnation) but that was fine.

"We had enough material with Gordon Tootoosis and Alex Rice and Jessica Amlee in order to pull it all together, so we did that."

There is a chance you may have already seen the truncated version of the film, based on the novel by Jake MacDonald. It aired in mid-September on APTN, and if you missed it, "so did a lot of people," Torrie says. "They didn't do a good job of promoting it at all."

So is there a chance that the film might actually serve as a pilot for a TV series? Torrie is hopeful.

"There was so much bad medicine around the project," says Torrie. "It wasn't meant to be at that time, and there was a lot of pain and suffering in the last three years.

"But Jake and I would love to do it as a series. Of course, we'd love to do it as a feature but at the very least we've got something that we could potentially kick around and say, 'Hey look at this.'"

The Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival runs from Wednesday, Nov. 18, to Sunday, Nov. 22. Julianna and the Medicine Fish screens at 7 p.m. Thursday night at the Garrick Event Centre during Manitoba Filmmakers Night. For the full program of WAFF films, log onto www.aboriginalfilmfest.org.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 C10