Latest posts from National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI)

A middle-aged man, weary and pensive, returns home on a train. He’s a complicated hero with a secret identity. Narrating his own story, he guides us through a series of flashbacks, beginning 20 years earlier where circumstances change the course of his life.

Creative team

Writer/director: Kelly Fanson
Producers: Kelly Fanson, Byron A. Martin, Tristan Sones

Filmmaker’s statement

Cleverly Disguised is a love letter to comedians and a wink to the superhero trope. Originally written as a novella, this was a challenging story to translate to film, but with a dedicated cast and crew, we were able to bring it to life.

I wanted to use colour to represent how my main character felt about his life. Having vignettes into the past was also a challenge, as the scenes were brief and spanned up to 20 years, but necessary to understand his journey. I didn’t want to overplay the drama but the dialogue was scarce even though, on the flip side, I had all of the ‘don’ts’ to contend with in the script: flashback, narration, a moving train (not exactly a don’t, but a challenge considering our budget).

The duality of what the main character is (a comedian) and what he is meant to seem (a superhero) was also a challenge, and add to that I didn’t want him to be likeable. I was careful not to give away that he’s a comedian but left subtle hints, making the viewer guess what kind of (super)hero he could be.

The style proved to be ambitious, but my incredible actors made it work. I love the look of the film and each performance. It’s a slow-moving reveal that I think worked well – told the story without revealing the truth until the end.

I am grateful to have worked with such a talented cast and crew who were tirelessly outside in the cold winter nights, and it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to explore these character’s journeys.

About Kelly Fanson

Kelly is an award-winning director with a 2017 Canadian Comedy Award for her web series, Best Before.

Kelly began her career as a child actor and, after returning from NYC at age 22, started her own children’s musical theatre company.

Years later, she directed Lie With Me at the Toronto Fringe Festival, receiving Patron’s Pick. She went on to direct, write and produce a series of experimental shorts before she began work on her web series.

These days, Kelly is kept busiest shooting shorts and developing shows for television.

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Featuring intimate, charming interviews with queer Canadians ranging in age from 88 to 17, Take Me To Prom invites audiences to revisit an adolescent milestone while telling a story of social change that spans more than 70 years.

Creative team

Director/producer: Andrew Moir
Commissioning editors: Lesley Birchard, Alex Hryniewicz, Adam Gee
Editor: Graeme Ring
Director of photography: Andrew Jeffrey
Production designer: Luis de Filippis
Composer: Ben Fox
Featuring: Alf Roberts, Fontaine, Alphonso King Jr, Marcy Rogers, Marc Hall, Carmen, Caroline Kan-Hai

Filmmaker’s statement

The people I met while making Take Me To Prom are a colourful group who have so much wisdom, humour and bravery to share. I admire each of them a great deal and I hope that audiences will too.

About Andrew Moir

Marked by their intimacy, Andrew Moir’s documentaries take audiences to seminal moments of his subjects’ lives.

He typically works with small crews and builds close relationships with the people featured in his work. He produces his films under his production company Hands Up Films and is currently working on a number of new long-form documentaries.

His shorts include Uprooted (2011), Just As I Remember (2013), Babe, I Hate To Go (2017) and Take Me To Prom (2019), which have screened at festivals including Hot Docs, Sheffield Doc/Fest, AFI DOCS, DOC NYC, and been nominated for Canadian Screen Awards.

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Twenty-two dogs, five days and 5,000 kilometres is part of the story behind the extraordinary rescue of 111 dogs.

Creative team

Writer/director: Stephen J. Payne
Producers: Scott McKay, Stephen J. Payne

About Stephen J. Payne

Stephen J. Payne has been making films and working in the film industry for over two decades primarily as a writer/producer/director. He has won awards at festivals in Houston, Texas, New Jersey and Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

Steve started making films back in the mid 1980s on 16mm film stock selling his short projects to the National Film Board and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. One of his releases, Two Singing Boys, was in wide distribution and picked up several awards when it was released in 1985.

He also spent time working on major commercial films such as A Christmas Story and The Killing Fields. In the late 1980s he went to work at CBC as a resource/environmental journalist working out of Toronto, Ontario, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and later Winnipeg, Manitoba.

In the late 1990s he moved to Winnipeg and began producing corporate and educational projects while finishing his education degree. He has taught screenwriting and digital media production at Red River College where he was also responsible for developing media curricula. He has produced numerous award-winning documentaries for television under the Totem Studios brand.

Operation Happy Day is his tenth documentary as writer/director. The project follows a dog rescue operation to Big Spring, Texas. Under Steve’s tenure, Totem Studios has branched out into drama production with their latest project Jack’s Live Bait currently on the festival circuit.

The team is also working on a documentary for the International Institute of Sustainable Development about the Experimental Lakes area in northwestern Ontario.

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