New on the Toronto production scene, New Real Films kickstarts its slate with The Perfect Son, a feature film first for director Leonard Farlinger.

Heading up the new prodco is Jennifer Jonas, whose long list of film credits includes first assistant director on Rhombus’ The Red Violin, associate producer on Last Night and coproducer on The Life Before This.

Jonas and Farlinger, a husband-and-wife team, have been in development on The Perfect Son since the director penned the dramatic script around two years ago.

A low-budget film, the story is about two estranged brothers: Theo, a 32-year-old, troubled writer fresh out of rehab, played by David Cubitt (Traders, Major Crime), and Ryan, an overachieving professional who appears to be the perfect son, played by Colm Feore (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Face Off). Chandra West (Something More, Revenge of the Land) is Theo’s ex-girlfriend, Sarah, an independent-minded med student.

Following their father’s funeral, the brothers are reunited, and as they are forced to deal with one another, Theo discovers that Ryan is gay and dying of aids.

‘It is a life-affirming story, which is something I wanted to see,’ says Farlinger. ‘I wanted to make a film that was not about aids, but was about loss. [The film] is about death, but it is really about life and how the two [brothers] interconnect in the film.’

The shoot is taking place on Toronto locations, including night club The Bovine Sex Club and the abandoned 9th floor of a downtown hospital, where a bathhouse set has been constructed.

Day 18 of filming calls for little in the way of costumes, as five large, chiseled men stand around the hallway of the bathhouse while Theo squeezes by them in search of his brother, whom he has been asked to come and collect.

‘In this [scene], [Ryan] is tired of taking care of himself and taking [medication], so he just abandons everything, gets drunk, goes to the bathhouse, is completely irresponsible and the screwup comes to his rescue,’ says Farlinger. ‘The journey of the brothers is a crisscross.’

In order to make the hallways seem longer than the hospital allows, the scene is shot several times with the men in different positions and Cubitt walking from different angles.

To capture Theo’s pov and make it easier to move through the narrow hallways of the bathhouse, dop Barry Stone shoots part of the scene using a handheld 35mm camera.

The shots at the opening of the film are wide, but as the characters grow closer together, the camera moves in tighter, making the film ‘about the smaller details,’ so that by the end, it is just the two brothers in a room.

Taking his cues from his ‘hero’ filmmaker, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Farlinger based the lighting design on 1987 French-Canadian film Night Zoo. The writer/director says you can always feel the light coming through the window and you always feel dusk and dawn.

Because the film is a ‘three hander,’ Jonas says casting was a challenge from the beginning, as it was imperative that they cast three actors (to play the two brothers and Sarah) who could bring different nuances of strength and pain in completely different ways.

Feore, who the director and producer worked with on Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, was cast in the lead role around a year ago, and although Farlinger had other people in mind for the role of Theo, when he saw the two actors together for the first time, Farlinger found the brother dynamic he was looking for.

‘David is a real method actor, and Colm is such a stage actor; their styles clash so much, yet it is so perfect for their characters,’ says Farlinger.

Other productions in the early stages of development at New Real include I’m Yours, a feature film script penned by Farlinger; a film written and directed by Peter Lynch (The Herd); and Jonas is looking at acquiring rights to a book. The Perfect Son is being distributed in Canada by Equinox Entertainment.