Latest posts from National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI)

Four new films in this week’s NSI Online Short Film Festival from directors Jeremy Lutter, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Jackie Hoffart and Dinae Robinson.

Reset

Reset | Sci-fi/Horror, 15:30, English, BC, 2015 | Director: Jeremy Lutter

A female android discovers she has feelings for her owner and must put her life on the line to gain a human connection.

The Time Traveller’s Pantoum

The Time Traveller’s Pantoum | Animation, 3:06, English, ON, 2017 | Director: Daniel Scott Tysdal

In this whiteboard animation, an aging time traveller meditates upon his failures as he attempts​ ​to stop his younger time​-​travelling self from ​​seeking to make the world a better place.

Kiss & Tell

Kiss & Tell | Documentary, 5:00, English, BC, 2015 | Jackie Hoffart

A dreamy meditation on the feeling of being transported back to a romantic memory every time you walk by the place where it happened.

How the Savage Came to Be

How the Savage Came to Be | Documentary, 9:00, English, MB, 2016 | Director: Dinae Robinson

Canada’s dark, behind-the-headlines history of the Indian Residential School system has only begun to surface within the past decade.

Testimonies from former students whose experiences are so dark and bleak, it’s hard to believe such an inhumane, government-funded, church-run school could ever exist.

What some might forget is that the victims were only children when they attended.

• • •

Call for films / submit by June 12

Films are now being accepted through FilmFreeway until Monday, June 12, 2017.

If your film is programmed, you have a chance of winning over $3K in cash awards. We accept films released after January 1, 2012.

Your film must be less than 30 mins long. Drama, comedy, animation, documentary, sci-fi, horror, music video and experimental are all eligible and must be made by a Canadian writer, director or producer.

Submit your film

• • •

The NSI Online Short Film Festival is made possible through the support of Festival Partner Telefilm Canada; Supporting Sponsors Entertainment One, Super Channel, Corus Entertainment, Blue Ant Media, The Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation and Breakthrough Entertainment; Award Sponsors A&E Television Networks, The Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation; Corus Entertainment and Blue Ant Media; and Industry Partner the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television.

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Congratulations to Amanda Strong (NSI IndigiDocs) who has been named one of seven recipients of the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards.

The Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards recognize outstanding artistic achievement by Canadian mid-career artists in seven disciplines: inter-arts, writing and publishing, music, dance, visual arts, media arts and theatre. Each winner receives $15,000.

Amanda’s work looks into lndigenous lineage, language and unconventional methods of storytelling. Each film is a collaborative process with a multi-layered approach to aspects of animation and the sonic spectrum.

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Project Lab, funded through the Calgary Film Centre, awarded grants to six projects from emerging filmmakers in Calgary and Edmonton over the weekend.

Jonesin’, a new project from producer Matt Watterworth and director Scott Westby (NSI Features First), received a development grant as part of the announcement.

Jonesin’ is a Guy Ritchie-esque adventure about a small-town boy who gets wrapped up in kidnapping and shady business deals. Production is slated for summer 2017 in Alberta.

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The Academy Apprenticeship for Women Directors provides intensive professional development to emerging female content creators across Canada by pairing each apprentice with an established director currently working on a project.

The six-month program is set to run from mid-September 2017 to mid-March 2018.

Applicants must have experience directing content in film, television, digital media, music videos, short films and/or commercials.

The deadline for applications is June 23, 2017. Apply online.

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Arm Nation, a new TV series from Picture This Productions‘ Maureen Marovitch (NSI Drama Prize, NSI Global Marketing) and David Finch (NSI Drama Prize, NSI Totally Television), is currently in production with APTN.

The 13 x 30 minute series focuses on the training, competitions and personal life challenges of a dozen Indigenous men and women who train, mentor and compete at the highest levels of one of the world’s oldest sports. It’s scheduled for broadcast fall 2018 on APTN.

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Congratulations to the NSI graduates whose projects were nominated for 2017 Northern Ontario Music & Film awards (NOMFA).

• Best TV or VOD series, best TV or VOD episode: Letterkenny from Mark Montefiore (NSI Totally Television) – winner of best episode and best series
• Best feature film: The Witch from producer Daniel Bekerman (NSI Features First) – nominee
• Best TV or VOD episode: NSI Totally Television-developed What Would Sal Do? from Mark Montefiore and Andrew DeAngelis – nominee

Awards were presented on May 27.

NOMFA aims to help facilitate growth in the music, film, and television industries in Northern Ontario.

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In this whiteboard animation, an aging time traveller meditates upon his failures as he attempts​ ​to stop his younger time​-​travelling self from ​​seeking to make the world a better place.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Daniel Scott Tysdal

Filmmaker’s statement

The Time Traveller’s Pantoum explores the perils, struggles and hopes of an aging time traveller and, more broadly, the complicated and endless labour of anyone who strives to make the world a better place.

The poem, published in my collection Fauxccasional Poems, is written as a pantoum, a 15^th-century Malaysian poetic form that is itself a sort of time-travelling poetic form: the second and fourth line of each stanza serve as the first and third line of the next stanza. As the poem unfolds, moving forward in time, it also travels back in time through these repetitions.

This short film is part of the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project, a series of shorts that employ popular YouTube genres to adapt fauxccasional poems (poems written about speculative, fake or alternative historical events).

Other examples include a documentary on the Enola Gay’s refusal to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, an a cappella tribute to JFK, dead at the age of 92, and a collective pledge of allegiance to Isis – the goddess, that is.

About Daniel Scott Tysdal

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the ReLit award-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Fauxccasional Poems (icehouse 2015), and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press 2014).

His film and video work includes the short film Film Frame, which was an official selection for the 2017 Toronto Short Film Festival, and the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project.

He is an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Learn more about his work at danielscotttysdal.com.

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A dreamy meditation on the feeling of being transported back to a romantic memory every time you walk by the place where it happened.

Creative team

Writer/director: Jackie Hoffart

Filmmaker’s statement

With Kiss & Tell, I wanted to take on some emotional dislocation I was experiencing at the time with respect to a handful of geographic locations throughout the city and the intimate, exciting moments I had once experienced there. But I wanted to foreground the experience of remembering – to translate that haunting, private feeling of regret, heartbreak and nostalgia that wash over me every time I pass by these places.

I’m grateful to Jon Thomas, my DP, who provided the gear and the expertise on shifting frame rates, and Naomi Mark who provided assistance and guidance at every step of the process.

About Jackie Hoffart

Jackie Hoffart is an escapee from Vancouver’s film and TV production grind, now bouncing much more happily from film festival to film festival, working behind the scenes in communications and logistics.

She does stand-up comedy once or twice a week around Vancouver, and is in production on her next documentary How To Bury a Housecat (When You Don’t Have a Yard).

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A female android discovers she has feelings for her owner and must put her life on the line to gain a human connection.

Produced with a grant awarded by bravoFACT (Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent), a division of Bell Media Inc.

Creative team

Writer: Ryan Bright
Director: Jeremy Lutter
Producers: Arnold Lim, Jocelyn Russell

Filmmaker’s statement

Reset started at an award show for a film festival where I met soon to be award-winning writer, Ryan Bright. We both had films in the festival and started chatting.

My previously successful short films have been about family themes, but this is mostly because my writer friend Ben Rollo wrote them (Joanna Makes a Friend and Gord’s Brother) and he doesn’t typically write a story with a protagonist over 11 years of age.

Ryan – who had noticed this trend in my filmography – remarked in the middle of our conversation over the snack table at the awards gala, “You don’t want to get pigeonholed as a family filmmaker, do you?”

This comment caught me off guard. I thought, “I don’t know. Do I?” I certainly never set out to be known for that. I also thought those films had a bit of a dark edge to them. He then suggested that he had just the breakout project for me called Reset.

I asked him to send me the script. He did and, when I read it, my first thought was this is the exact opposite of anything I had ever made. I loved it. The script touched on themes of loneliness, technology, love, objectification and what it means to be human.

I thought it was a story set in the future but also very much about the problems we are facing today. I agreed to look for financing to get the script made. I pitched a fund in Canada called BravoFACT that funds short films and we won a grant and – thanks to the kind people at Bell Media – we made this amazing short film.

In short, I made the film because it was a story I thought needed to be told now and it was outside my comfort zone as a filmmaker.

To me, Reset is a film about loneliness. All the characters are lonely and struggle with it in different ways. I have spent most of my life feeling lonely and trying to fill a void inside myself. I have even tried to use technology to fill the gap. When I was younger, I would search for people online. The relationships I built were interesting but not very grounded.

They were human relationships without ever being in the same room, but what if it was the opposite – a non-human relationship but with someone or something that is real. Can we replace these human connections with technology? What does that mean for us?

About Jeremy Lutter

Measuring in at a height of six feet seven inches tall, Jeremy understands the benefit of standing out in a crowd. He studied creative writing in his hometown at the University of Victoria. Since graduating, his work has been seen on The Movie Network, MuchMusic, MTV, CBC, Bravo!, TV Italy, Air Canada and screened at festivals around the world.

Jeremy pitched the MPPIA Short Film Award at the 2010 Whistler Film Festival and won funding and in-kind services to make a short film called Joanna Makes a Friend. That film was a huge success and went on to screen at over 20 film festivals worldwide, winning several awards including the audience choice award at both TIFF Kids and Victoria Film Festival.

Telefilm Canada took notice and presented Joanna Makes a Friend at the Cannes Film Market as a part of their Not Short on Talent program in 2012. The film stars Dalila Bela and Fred Ewanuick (Dan For Mayor, Corner Gas).

Jeremy has made a series of award-winning short films over over the years. Through the NSI Drama Prize program and BravoFACT with filmmaker Daniel Hogg, they made a short film called Floodplain which stars Cameron Bright (Twilight, X-Men, Thank You for Smoking) and Sarah Desjardins.

The Harold Greenberg Fund’s Short to Feature launched his next project, Gord’s Brother, about a young boy and his monster brother. The film is written by longtime friend and Joanna Makes a Friend writer Ben Rollo.

Jeremy’s first feature, the Telefilm Canada-funded horror thriller The Hollow Child, premiered earlier this year.

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