Sibling filmmakers’ quirky short vying for $30K prize

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This article was published 25/08/2022 (1484 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Siblings Taylor and Laina Brown live in the same house. As adults. With their partners. And get this: the two of them work together, too, doing something they’ve done since they were wearing Velcro shoes.

The Browns make movies.

Their earlier work, shot on camcorder in the early 2000s, was avant-garde and criminally underseen in the independent elementary school market. In King Crab, a pet crustacean faced off against toy knights and warriors. A homage to Japanese monster cinema and disaster films pitted a Beanie Baby citizenry against the Browns’ pet cat, who “Godzillaed” its way through the town, crushing whatever it walked by under the weight of its vicious and cuddly paws. The Beanie Babies gave their everything in service of their pint-sized directors’ vision.

For a while, the Browns — Taylor is 29, Laina is 32 — went their separate ways, working in creative pursuits such as wedding photography and commercial videography. But in 2015, they packed up from Saskatchewan and drove east, and by the next year, they’d started Folks Films, a production company.

They’d been told by some people that filmmaking couldn’t be a sustainable career on the Prairies. In Winnipeg, they tried their best to prove those villains wrong.

Now, their short film is one of nine in contention for a $30,000 prize, airing nationally on CBC’s Short Film Face Off on Saturday. It’s the only film from the Prairies up for the prize — a wheat-toting David in a field of shiny, big-city Goliaths.

Shot in 2019 during the 48 Film Festival — a two-day short-film-making challenge — Model Citizens follows a pair of siblings (Mack Norberg and Jaydin Pommer) who share a living space, as well as a strange relationship. The sister builds tiny models and orders tons of pizza. The brother prefers calzones, and is flummoxed and frustrated by his sister’s quirks.

Things get tense, and then the pizza man (Spencer Adamus, in a Wall Street Slice visor) shows up to conduct a therapy session, using miniature figurines in an attempt to smooth over the siblings’ latest row.

It’s a weird, funny fiction that seems drawn from life. “I grew up making models, and was always on the fantasy, nerdy side of things,” Taylor says. “I’ve always been obsessed with dioramas.”

The siblings never whipped calzones at each other, as one character does in the film, but they do know the stresses of living together — Taylor leaves his hot sauce on the windowsill and Laina leaves her little socks (“sockettes”) all over the house — and now, those small quirks could lead to a big payday.

Taylor Brown almost missed the email from CBC saying their film was accepted out of thousands of entries. “I didn’t see it for three days,” he said. Thankfully, he opened his junk folder.

On Saturday night, the film, written by Nate Flaman, airs on CBC at 8 p.m. After that, audiences have 24 hours to vote online for their favourite short. If the Browns’ film wins, it is shown again the following week with 30,000 loonies on the line.

Taylor is planning to watch the show during his 10-year high school reunion in Regina, while Laina will be at a friend’s wedding when the short film airs.

Regardless of the result, the siblings say they’re proud to have their film seen by such a wide audience — much wider than that of King Crab. “It all started when we were playing Beanie Babies,” Laina says.

How many Beanie Babies can $30,000 buy?

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com