East coast

TAKE ONE, Dec-Feb, 1999 by Ron Foley Macdonald

The 19th annual Atlantic Film Festival unleashed a record number of Atlantic features, including the long-awaited Halifax premiere of hometown boy Thom Fitzgerald's Beefcake, along with New Brunswick director Rodrigue Jean's impassioned Full Blast, Stephen Reynolds's The Divine Ryans and Mike Clattenburg's Trailer Park Boys.

Clement Virgo's One Heart Broken Into Song, produced by Bill MacGillivray from poet George Elliott Clarke's original script, also made its big-screen debut to widely mixed reviews. While Beefcake picked up awards for art direction, music score and supporting actor (CBC-TV kid show host Jonathan Torrens), the big winners were Full Blast (Rodrigue Jean for Best Director and co-winner for best writing) and Alan Moyle's sparkling New Waterford Girl, which won Best Canadian Feature and picked up Best Sound Design for good measure. The Divine Ryans, the region's flagship picture for 1999, managed to cop a shared win for best writing (Wayne Johnston's script from his own novel) and the coveted Best Actor in a lead role for young St. John's-based Jordan Harvey. Mike Clattenburg's wild, low-budget comedy, Trailer Park Boys, was shown out of competition, as he served on the festival jury. The film, a 75-minute faux documentary about a couple of white trash pest-removal experts, was made--amazingly enough--for less than $10,000 on digital video in black-and-white. Relentlessly paced and howlingly funny, it represents an exciting, film-agency-free direction for the Atlantic industry.... Nova Scotia's warm, lingering fall and gentle early winter is seeing the most intense period of film activity in its entire history. Five features are underway, all from away except for Black Harbour co-creator Wayne Grigsby's Codename: Caviar, a drug-bust policier that sees Halifax tarting itself up to look like Montreal. Caroline Bell's Deeply, starring the redoubtable Lynn Redgrave, is shooting at Mill Coe and Ironbound Island in St. Margaret's Bay, while the CBS MOW Songs in Ordinary Time, starring Beau Bridges and Sissy Spacek, is shooting in Windsor at the head of the Annapolis Valley. Finally, Farrah Fawcett is in town shooting another MOW entitled Baby, executive produced by Glenn Close. Most Halifax-based producers are ambivalent about this rush of outside work as it gobbles up crews and studio facilities, driving up wages and prices. Local production houses, busy with series television and one-off documentaries, await the new funds for indigenous features promised by the federal government. Perhaps this time next year all the features being shot here will be written, directed and produced by Atlantic Canadians.