Winnipeg works making waves onscreen

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This article was published 11/09/2020 (2196 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg-lensed comedy short So, What Do You Think? will be playing at TIFF this weekend.

Well, to clarify, it will be playing at the Toronto Independent Film Festival — a.k.a. the Toronto Indie — a fest that runs concurrently with the Toronto International Film Festival as a showcase for low-budget or no-budget independent films.

Written and directed by Winnipegger Jeff Eyamie and produced by Karen Tusa, the film depicts a tense few minutes between a wife (Ali Tataryn) painting a picture, and her husband (Adam Hurtig) attempting to navigate his response when she asks him the titular question.

If it all seems familiar to, well, anyone who has been married, Eyamie, 47, confirms that the short was inspired by his own home life. In fact, his wife, Tiffany Barrett Eyamie, painted the pictures seen in the film, and the short was shot in their house.

“The film ended up being kind of a love letter to my wife,” Eyamie says. “It’s a cousin of the ‘Do I look fat in this?’ conversation. We all go through it and there is a dance to do there… so I was kind of playing with that dance.

“I wanted to do something that people could identify with.”

Eyamie is a busy guy. He works for Health Canada by day; in October, he is launching a novel titled Still Me: A Golf Tragedy in 18 Parts, published by Turnstone Press.

“My aspiration these days is for every year to just have one TV project, one film project and one fiction project on the go and in development,” he says. “I want to make sure that I’m always creating and not worrying about where it ends up.”

The short film is already available to be viewed on Amazon in Europe.

“I think the plan is to caption it so that we can stream it on Amazon U.S.,” he says. “So that’s in the works.”

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The Canadian medical drama Transplant, which debuted on the American network NBC on Sept. 1 after becoming the most watched original series on CTV this spring, was a hit stateside, winning its 10 p.m. timeslot with an estimated four million viewers, according to PlayBack, a media-industry website.

The showrunner and executive producer on the show is former Winnipegger Joseph Kay. He told the Free Press a couple of weeks back that he hoped the show, about a Syrian refugee (Hamza Haq) who lands a residency at a Toronto hospital after saving the life of its emergency department chief (John Hannah), would be a “fertile for the dialogue that’s going on in the country” in this election year.

“I think that we add to it by just telling a human story without being political about it,” Kay said.

Looks as though many Americans responded.

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Another Winnipeg success story, Sean Garrity’s romantic comedy I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight, will be held over for a fourth week at McGillivray and Northgate cinemas in town.

It will also be held over for a second week in the Toronto and Vancouver markets, and it starts today in Calgary and Edmonton.

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(imageTagright)The Winnipeg-lensed Percy, starring Christopher Walken as Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser, will be playing cinemas commencing Oct. 9. The film, which shot in the province in the summer of 2018, depicts Schmeiser’s years-long legal battle with biotech giant Monsanto and co-stars Christina Ricci, Luke Kirby and Zach Braff, all helping distract us from a Queens accent coming from a Saskatchewan farmer.

The trailer is at wfp.to/percytrailer.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing