Celebrating Prairie art at TIFF

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This article was published 12/09/2017 (3308 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — The annual Manitoba Party at the Toronto International Film Festival was short this year of local filmmakers whose work actually had a slot in the festival.

But those filmmakers did show at the fete at the Drake Hotel, which is held every year on the first Sunday of the fest. Conor Sweeney and Milos Mitrovic, co-directors of the short film homer_b, spent much of their time modestly sitting in a corner of the chic, second-floor patio venue.

homer_b is a dark, experimental film featuring live actors wearing Simpsons masks. It’s a companion piece to another short, homer_a, an even more dark short in which a masked Homer is killed by kids in Bart and Millhouse masks. Describing it as “The Simpsons meets Harmony Korine,” Sweeney says he was surprised the less violent homer-b was the one to end up in TIFF’s Short Cuts program.

But both filmmakers were happy to be there, especially since it gave them the opportunity to leave the party at 11 p.m. to catch the Midnight Madness screening of the French film Revenge. (As a member of the Astron-6 collective who made the 2014 Midnight Madness entry The Editor, Sweeney’s departure was especially understandable. Midnight Madness, a program devoted to the more extreme realms of cinema, is where Sweeney lives.)

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An Oscar-winner was circulating at the party, but most people probably wouldn’t be aware of him. Roger Avary, who won the best original screenplay award alongside Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction (1995), certainly belonged at the event — and not just because he was born in Flin Flon. Avary said he has been trying to get a film going in Winnipeg for a long time.

But a part of the reason it hasn’t happened is that Manitoba has been too busy with other films (including the recently wrapped Kristen Stewart movie JT Leroy) and television series, including the ongoing SyFy series Channel Zero.

Avary was trying to shoot a script titled Lucky Day in Winnipeg but had to move it to Toronto, where it’s in pre-production with stars Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and Clé Bennett (who played muscle to Kevin Pollak’s loan shark in Sean Garrity’s Borealis).

“There aren’t the crew numbers in Winnipeg,” Avary says, adding he is planning a drama to be shot next year based on the story of the Ghanaian refugees who lost fingers to the cold while crossing the border from the U.S. to Canada, with local producer Ian Dimerman of Inferno Pictures.

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Adding a Toronto shine to the prairie proceedings was actress Jennifer Dale, who is preparing to wing her way to Winnipeg later this month to shoot the drama Invisible Light for writer-director Shelagh Carter, commencing in October. The film’s producer, Jeff Peeler of Frantic Films, joked he wouldn’t allow Carter to come to Toronto while she was gearing up for the film, which will also star Peter Kelaghan and, possibly, Stratford stage legend Martha Henry.

The Toronto International Film Festival continues until Sept. 17.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing