Having accumulated 20 years’ experience in many facets of the film business, Greg Klymkiw says working a festival has become second nature. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival he will be putting his know-how behind what he calls an art film in the finest tradition of nouvelle vague, City of Dark.

Klymkiw, with his company Hryhory Yulyan Motion Pictures, has been an enduring independent voice in Canadian film, producing a number of critically well-received features, and he has been a consistent presence at the Toronto fest.

In various turns as an exhibitor, art house programmer, booking agent and director of marketing for the creatively fecund Winnipeg Film Group from 1987 to 1991, Klymkiw has a range of experience which he brings to the business of production, development and distribution, and the art of leveraging the festival to promote a film.

In addition to a number of shorts and tv documentaries and series, Klymkiw has produced about 10 features as an independent with some of the ascendant names on the Canadian filmmaking landscape. Film credits include Bruce Duggan’s Smoked Lizard Lips and Alan Zweig’s Vinyl as well as three films with both Cynthia Roberts – Bubbles Galore, The Last Supper and Jack of Hearts – and with Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin – Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful.

City of Dark, this year’s festival entrant, was written and directed by Bruno Lazaro Pacheco, and produced by Klymkiw and Pacheco for October Films and Michael Allder for the National Film Board.

The last festival film in which Klymkiw had a production stake was Maddin’s Careful, which ran on opening night of the 1992 Perspective Canada program. In 1990, he went to the festival with Maddin’s Archangel.

Klymkiw has been a presence at every tiff since 1988, using the festival to market productions whether the films happen to be screening or not.

In one case, the fact a film wasn’t screening provided a marketing opportunity for Klymkiw. When Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital was excluded from the 1988 festival lineup, the producer utilized the backlash to sell the title. ‘Because people were so outraged that the film wasn’t in the festival, I was able to use the festival to promote and market it,’ he says.

Klymkiw calls City of Dark a post-modern take on the sci-fi genre. The story centers on a computer research scientist, Plato, who develops a means of scanning people’s brains to reveal their innermost thoughts. When he discovers that his invention is being used as part of a nefarious corporate scheme, Plato faces the dilemma of destroying his life’s work or being complicit in his company’s wrongdoing.

Klymkiw says the film follows the tradition of art and new wave filmmaking, borrowing inspiration primarily from director Jean-Luc Godard.

‘It’s an art film in the traditional sense of an art film,’ says Klymkiw. ‘It really is the kind of film that isn’t often made anymore.’

The project originated five years ago when Pacheco brought the script (Pacheco’s script consultant was renowned Quebec filmmaker Jean Pierre Lefebvre, who also appears in the film) to Klymkiw, who had recently moved from Winnipeg to Toronto. The pair brought the project to nfb executive producer Dennis Murphy and Michael Allder, producer of last year’s festival darling Project Grizzly.

Funding from the Canada Council, the nfb and substantial deferrals from cast and crew made up the film’s budget of just under $1 million.

With a complex post procedure, completion of the film was set for just prior to its first public screening Sept. 10 at 9:30 p.m. at the Cumberland. A 16mm to 35mm blowup added significant lab time, says Klymkiw, and aside from the normal complications that the process entails, it became a more exacting job due to some of the film’s peculiarities.

First, says Klymkiw, the film is black and white, with a very specific look: ‘The blowup process is important to the look of the film. In addition, the film contains numerous optical effects and has over 2,500 cuts (an average film has about 1,000), with some shots only three and four frames long.

‘There are some amazing but intense montage sequences,’ explains Klymkiw. ‘It becomes an incredibly complicated procedure when you’re cutting the negative and then doing a blowup.’

Many of the optical effects were handled by John Furniotis at Toronto’s Film Effects, while the blowup was completed at Duart in New York.

With City of Dark, Klymkiw says the primary objective at the festival is to make foreign sales, with special attention paid to European territories. At the same time, he will be occupied with the usual demanding task of generating word of mouth and critical interest in the film.

‘It’s a very subtle thing,’ says Klymkiw of the process of reconnecting with past contacts and trying to draw other film festival directors to the screening.

A bonus of the Toronto festival, he says, is its high quotient of festival programmers and its potential as an international launching pad. ‘One of the nice things about Toronto is that every festival programmer that has a festival worth entering is here and looking for product.’