When it comes right down to it, this year’s FIN Atlantic International Film Festival belongs to Taylor Olson: The writer, actor and director debuted his first feature film—and biggest role to date—at the annual celebration of cinema, where the flick went on to score four out of seven festival awards.
Based on Catherine Banks’s landmark, Governor General’s Award-winning
play of the same name, Bone Cage unpacks a portrait of masculinity calcifying into a toxic hardness as a young man works operating a wood processor, clear-cutting for pulp—destroying the rural area he calls home in the process. (“He puts on this protective armour to protect himself and he has this sort of masculinity—this performative masculinity—he has to take on, and then that becomes a part of him. It’s because of the environment he lives in and how he’s surviving in it,” Olson told The Coast of the film’s lead, Jamie, earlier this month.)
The film won Best Atlantic Cinematographer (for Kevin A. Fraser’s work on Bone Cage); The Michael Weir Award for Best Atlantic Screenwriting; The Gordon Parsons Award for Best Atlantic Feature and Best Atlantic Director. Previous nods towards the project came in the form of Olson receiving funding through
through Telefilm’s annual Talent to Watch program (of which past winners include Ashley McKenzie’s Werewolf and Cory Bowles’ Black Cop).
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This article appears in Sep 1-30, 2020.
