W>e know where you’ll be this week. You, like everyone else in
town, will become a cinephile, seeing documentaries, short films and
features at the Atlantic Film Festival.
What you might not realize is while you’re opening your mind in
darkened screening rooms, the wheels behind the scenes are turning. For
the 12th year, the Strategic Partners international co-production
conference is going on. A business event—bringing together Canadian
and international producers, broadcasters, agents and entrepreneurs to
meet and network—it’s one part speed-dating, where film biz people
meet and see if they have something to offer each other, and one part
mixer, with dinners, drinks and speakers gathered together to talk
about the economic realities of partnerships across international
borders.
Big names scheduled to
attend this year include Damon D’Oliveira, actor and producer of the
Halifax-set Poor Boy’s Game, who is working an adaptation of
Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes. Also expected is
Polish producer Dariusz Jablonski of Apple Film Production who is
working on a picture called Immigrant, based on the story of
Robert Dziekanski, who died at the Vancouver Airport in 2007 after
being Tasered. The keynote speakers at Strategic Partners are former
NFB and Denys Arcand producer Roger Frappier and Simon Vaughan,
producer of a new Ben Hur series.
The event, capped off at 200 delegates, creates an intimacy not
found at a lot of bigger festivals. What’s important for local and
Canadian filmmakers is that they can meet people who can help their
movies get made. SP director Jan Miller can mention a few success
stories right off the top of her head, like Surveillance, the
Jennifer Lynch thriller that screened at the AFF last year. It was a
USA/Germany co-production that came through SP at one point. Another
was the Canada/Germany co-pro Otto; or Up With Dead People, from
Bruce LaBruce, and this year’s Atlantic Gala, Love and Savagery,
a Canadian co-pro with Ireland. “These projects have to go through a
million different opportunities,” says Miller. “Strategic Partners is
recognized by the producers of all those that it was significant in
helping them develop.”
Former Coast cover star Chaz Thorne made a big splash at 2007’s AFF,
with a feature he wrote and produced, Poor Boy’s Game, and one
he wrote and directed, Just Buried. He’s a fan of Strategic
Partners.
“I think that it’s great that an industry event like that takes
place in Halifax where you can meet all these international colleagues
right here at home. That’s pretty damn cool.” The film Thorne is
working on right now, called Whirligig—he hopes to shoot it in
Nova Scotia over the winter—is partly a product of a meeting he had
with an international distributor at SP. “When I was putting together
the financing for this film, I gave him a call and now we’re working
together. That one meeting that you have may seem like an in-passing
thing at the time but it could actually make the difference if you make
a movie in the future.”
Producer-director Camelia Frieberg attended SP in 2007 with two
projects in the works: a feature script she wrote called Dizzy and the Ami McKay novel she’d optioned, The Birth House.
“Concretely, neither of those projects have yet come to pass, which
is not an unusual thing in the film world,” she says, laughing. “At the
same time, amazing contacts were made out of that. Though they weren’t
fruitful directly for those projects they were in many other ways. And
they may yet bear fruit for those ones. You can’t look at these things
short-term or you’d just put the noose around your neck.”
Frieberg says it’s not just the scheduled meetings that benefit
filmmakers, it’s the dinners and social events. “Those create the
non-pressure opportunities to clink a glass, and that’s when the real
meet happens.”
Love and Savagery
Friday, September 18, 7pm Oxford Theatre
$15
Tickets at Video Difference, AFF box office atlanticfilm.com, ticketpro.ca, 422-6965
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.