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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Filmmakers 'really excited' about local première
IAN MCCAUSLAND PHOTO Filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky.
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Truth be told, tonight's première of Indie Game: The Movie at Cinematheque is somewhat anticlimactic.
The movie has had a couple of screenings in Winnipeg already. It has been available online for weeks on iTunes, the filmmakers' website indiegamethemovie.com and the PC game site Steam. And it has already been released to much acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival (where it won a Best Editing award in the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition) and the SXSW Festival.
But Winnipeg directors James Swirsky, 34, and Lisanne Pajot, 29 are buzzing with anticipation anyway.
"We're really excited about it," says Swirsky, the founder of the digital film production company Blinkworks. "It takes on a different weight than most other showings, because you're showing it to your peers ... people that you'll have to see again.
"At the same time, Winnipeg has been awesome to us and extremely supportive and you want to share it with the people you've talked about it with for the last two years. It's special and it's full of pressure."
"It's also neat because we're back in Winnipeg," adds Pajot, a former CBC documentary producer. "We've been on the road pretty much for six months. After Sundance, we built our own tour and did appearances across the States.
"We just want to be home now. So this comes at a great time."
Indeed, the film's sales have been sufficient to put the movie, crowd-sourced via Kickstarter, into the black.
"We actually hit #14 on the iTunes U.S. chart, where we were sandwiched between Mark Wahlberg and Katherine Heigl," Swirsky says. "It's been going really well and it seems to be resonating with an audience."
The story of the movie's primary subjects, four video game designers, resonated strongly with the filmmakers themselves. The film was inspired by a shorter doc the pair made about Winnipeg game designer Alec Holowka and his experiences creating the award-winning game Aquaria. Swirsky and Pajot were both surprised by how the creation of a video game can be a deeply personal process for the designer. Pajot says, as filmmakers, they could fully relate.
"It's uncanny," she says. "We could identify with our own emotional process all the ups and downs that they've gone through and moments and we didn't expect that. We knew that we were making a film that was personal to them. We didn't expect to realize how personal it would become to us."
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 6, 2012 D1
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