Chilly production found warm welcome

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This article was published 13/04/2019 (2605 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Released in time for Easter next weekend, the shot-in-Winnipeg movie Breakthrough is a tale of a medical resurrection deemed miraculous by those who witnessed it.

The story is based on the account of Joyce Smith (played by This Is Us star Chrissy Metz in the film), who, in 2015, was summoned to a hospital emergency room on a cold Martin Luther King Day weekend in St. Louis after her adoptive son John fell through the ice of a frozen Missouri lake. Under water for more than 15 minutes before being rescued, and subsequently without a pulse for 45 minutes afterwards as doctors tried in vain to resuscitate him, John popped an EKG reading after his mother clutched his feet and prayed for God to bring him back.

The official medical record says: “Patient dead, mother prayed, patient came back to life.”

Astute viewers of faith-based films may recognize similarity between Breakthrough and the 2014 film Heaven Is for Real, in which a young boy came back from a coma describing uncanny visions of heaven.

Both films were shot in southern Manitoba. And both films were produced by DeVon Franklin, producer, preacher and motivational speaker, who happily returned to the province in February of last year for an intensive 32-day shoot.

“There were two reasons to shoot in Winnipeg,” Franklin says in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “One: we needed to find a frozen lake, and it was the only place in North America where we could do that in February.

“The other reason was that Winnipeg looks very much like the (U.S.) Midwest,” he says. “The story took place originally in St. Louis, so we needed a place where we could model that, and Winnipeg was a perfect place.

“Not to mention the tax credit, which was very helpful,” he adds. “We saved a lot of money, so we could put a lot more money on the screen because of Winnipeg.”

The film eschews the political flavour of some films targeted to evangelical Christian audiences, such as God Is Not Dead, films that see Christians victimized and undermined by atheistic forces in government and academia.

Indeed, when viewed in the context of Trump-supporting evangelicals who have embraced the president’s war on Latin immigrants, the film may have a subversive edge to it. John Smith, seen in the film’s opening frames as a Christ figure, is a Guatemalan-born child, adopted by the Smith family. Franklin acknowledges the film’s young hero may be provocative just in terms of his race.

“I thought it was really compelling and very, very interesting that John Smith was adopted from Guatemala and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis,” Franklin says. “He had all these questions about why his skin colour was different and why he wasn’t wanted by his birth mother. That was a big part of the crisis that we portray in the film.

“He was really trying to figure it out who he was,” Franklin says. “And then he went through this incident and came out realizing it was the love of his mother and the love of his community that rallied around him that spelled out for him that he had a plan and a purpose and a place.”

The film is directed by Roxann Dawson, a former TV actor (she was the half-human, half-Klingon B’Elanna Torres on Star Trek: Voyager) turned TV director (The Good Wife, Scandal, House of Cards) making her feature film debut with Breakthrough.

“She did a brilliant job and I love her dearly,” Franklin says. “She’s a massive talent. She’s been directing television for a very long time, and when she walked into my office and told me her pitch on the movie, her personal connection to the story was one of the reasons why I knew she was the director for this film.

“One of her daughters is adopted,” Franklin says. “She told me the story of her adoption and it was just so close to John Smith‘s story and his adoption.

“And I just knew that she understood this story on another level.”

Franklin is a Los Angeles native, and he acknowledges the trip to Winnipeg last year was a changeup from the comparatively balmy shoot of Heaven Is for Real in the summer of 2013.

“The cold was tough, but at the end of the day, I really enjoyed being there,” he says. “The community made the cold bearable because everyone was certainly warm at heart up there.”

“We had such a good time and the people are amazing, accommodations were good and the food was good, so I would definitely make another movie in Winnipeg, without a doubt,” he says.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing