Jasmine Oore’s winning ways

“People would say, ‘What’s your film about?’ and I’d say
‘It’s about living glamourously with bowel disease,'” says Jasmine
Oore, “and it would make the room silent. And then I would add, ‘It’s a
comedy.’ And it would get worse!”

The silence-inducing concept, Glamour Guts—a shrewdly
timed, freeze-frame-filled laugh riot—was written and directed by
Oore through the 2008 edition of the Atlantic Filmmakers’ Cooperative’s
One Minute Film program and has turned out to be a local hit. After
screenings in the last two Halifax Independent Filmmakers’ Festivals
and the 2008 Atlantic Film Festival, on July 4 Glamour Guts was
crowned the winner of Short Film Faceoff. In its second season
on CBC, the show pitted nine local filmmakers against one another over
three weeks before opening to a public vote. Her win amounts to a
$35,000 development/production deal from the CBC for her next
project.

Oore writes from experience, having been diagnosed with Chron’s
disease—inflammation of the intestines—as a teen; her colon was
removed in 2002. She also starred in the film. “Various people who were
close to me in my life were worried about me exposing myself that much.
One of my brothers offered to play me in drag and for a little while
that was a potential plan,” she says, laughing, which she does often.
(Her brothers include the musicians Dani and Sageev. The latter
“brilliantly improvised it, while the film played on my laptop, perched
on his piano.”) “That elicited way better response—then people could
actually laugh at the idea—but ultimately, it didn’t feel like it
would be honest enough. The decision to be in it was feeling like that
was the most honest thing to do.”

Honesty is something the filmmaker strives for in her work: her
first project, a scholarship through the Centre for Art Tapes, was
about her grandmother, and her new CBC project, There’s Been a
Terrible Mistake, is about the fallout of the car accident she and
her boyfriend Ezra Morrell were in two days after the Glamour
Guts shoot. He did not survive. (“It’s a journey through grief.
Also a comedy, also doesn’t seem to illicit much laughter when I
explain it.”) Oore edited Glamour Guts on a laptop in the
hospital.

“It was a more intense experience than I think it normally would
have been,” she says, “but good to give me a point of focus.”

The experience of Glamour Guts was ultimately a freeing one,
despite the intimate subject matter and the intense circumstance that
coloured its production. “There’s something that feels good about
taking emotional risks. It’s scary, but it’s more rewarding than not,”
says Oore.

And on a practical level, “It’s been such a challenge to reconcile
the conflict of having my real situation and my real problems, which is
not particularly socially graceful to talk about or to let people know
about, and the fact that I’m naturally, almost pathologically, an open
and honest person,” she says. “So I’ve been struggling with that since
I got sick, which is when I was 14. And that for me is what this movie
was about—addressing those moments of impossibility and reconciling
the duplicitous nature of my life. I definitely feel good that this
movie deals with it in a way that is honest but where I don’t feel like
I’m that girl at the party who’s like, ‘Wah wah wah…my bowels,
my problems, my bowels.'”

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2009.