Eclipse: first feature explores diverse private lives

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Summer, 1993 by Shlomo Schwartzberg

The search for intiniacy is being played out in the city of Toronto. But this time it's in a movie.

Local filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa is putting the finishing touches to Eclipse, his first feature, which probes the public and private lives of various Torontonians of different backgrounds, sexual orientations and classes. Among them, a gay Asian street hustler, a middle-aged businessman who is conducting a clandestine affair with his French Canadian maid and an actor who is infatuated with a male performance artist.

The calm and collected Podeswa, who is best known for the short film David Roche Talks To You About Love, is sitting outside the Queen St. club The Boom Boom Room. It's doubling for a bar that is the site for an assignation between the actor (played by Daniel MacIvor) and both a man and a woman, at different times during the night. Like the other seven main characters, Michael, the part played by MacIvor, has two personas. "The film really shows the public side and private side. We don't know all the sides of life,' says Podeswa. The eclipse of the title is a metaphor for the characters' lives, "their bright and dark, positive and negative aspects. When you look at an eclipse you go blind. It's (the film) a look at the things we're not supposed to look at."

MacIvor, who was an ensemble member of the Dora Mavor Moore awardwinning theatrical production The Lorca Play and was involved in Eclipse when it still was being workshopped, sees his character as personifying "a plea for contact, a desperation for some contact. I want to be in love with someone." His part he says, also has parallels to the act of acting. Actors can't seem to connect in their real lives, it seems less real."

For Podeswa, reality was of crucial importance in Eclipse, which is why he populated his Toronto with people of varying ethnic groups and colours. "I wanted to really reflect Toronto's ethnic and cultural life. I wanted to reflect that there is this great diversity in Toronto, which is not really reflected in Canadian movies, as opposed to specific ethnicity (in some movies)."

Artistically Podeswa wanted to differ from the norm as well. He's actually shot Eclipse in black and white but will print it in colour, which will give the film a colour-washed, tinted look, though he hastens to add that it will not look like an old tinted silent movie. "I wanted to create a sort of theatrical effect, a self-enclosed world."

Unlike other Canadian films, Eclipse hasn't been made with any federal or provincial funding. Instead it is being supported by German money, paid out by the German distributor TiMe, a connection do was forged by Eclipse coproducer Camelia Frieberg at, the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands. The modestly budgeted" film (Podeswa won't be more specific) has therefore been using any locations it can get. Some such as Frieberg's own house, or the house next door to her parents, for minimal or no cost Ifs also not guaranteed of a Canadian distribution deal, which would have been part of the package if it were funded here.

Podeswa doesn't seem to be worried about its chances of being picked up for distribution in Canada, possibly because its sales rights are being handled by successful Quebec-based company Films Transit. He hopes to open Eclipse, which also stars Pascale Montpetit (H), Earl Paskto (Highway 61) and Manuel Aranguiz (Paper Wedding), in mid-Winter. [section]