The Claude Jutra Award honors excellence in direction of a first feature film. The prize was established in 1993 by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to recognize talented new filmmakers. Following are

sketches of the 10 nominees for this year.

* Louis Belanger

Post Mortem

As director of a first feature film, Louis Belanger says he was surprised when his film Post Mortem was nominated for best picture (along with four other nominations), although he admits he was not surprised at his nomination for the Claude Jutra award for best first-time feature.

‘I thought I had a chance in the category of first feature because the film was well received when it was released,’ he says. Indeed, at the Montreal World Film Festival, where it debuted in September, Post Mortem garnered Belanger both critical praise and a best director award.

Produced by Lorraine Dufour at Coop de Video de Montreal, Post Mortem is the story of Linda (Sylvie Moreau), a devoted mother who is going to great lengths to make enough money to get her five-year-old out of the city and on to a better life. She unexpectedly meets Ghislain (Gabriel Arcand), a recluse on the margins of society who leads a desperately routine life, and an unlikely relationship helps each to grow and rediscover parts of themselves.

‘It is a film about love, but to say that is to simplify it,’ says Belanger. ‘It is about two people who are becoming better than they were before through daily living. My goal was to tell a story and to show life as it is. I am not someone who likes to do pirouettes with the camera. I want to show life with my films, not show cinema.’

Post Mortem, distributed by Film Tonic, was shot in Montreal in Belanger’s own neighborhood, Little Italy, near Jean Talon Market. ‘I spent a lot of time there, getting a feel for the place and talking to the people there. The people who live there were the extras for the film.’

The film’s two lead actors, Moreau and Arcand, have also received Genie nominations for their performances. ‘I have to give them great credit for the film’s nominations,’ says Belanger. ‘They brought these characters to life, telling the story I wanted to tell. Through these characters I wanted to show the potential, the grandeur and the magnificence of humanity,’ he continues. ‘If I achieve that and if I get audiences thinking about things when they get home from the theatre, then I am happy and I have done my job.’ Louise Leger

* John Doyle

Extraordinary Visitor

Anyone who has visited St. John’s, Nfld., will recall the city being dominated by a larger-than-life statue of St. John overlooking the city. It certainly made an impression on John Doyle – so much so that his feature film directorial debut features the saint in a starring role.

Extraordinary Visitor, cleverly set in what is described as ‘millennial times,’ meaning it can be recycled in the run-up to 2001, has that most millennial of themes – the end of the world – at its core. St. John has returned to earth with the mission to forestall the end, but to do this he must find a sign of hope within seven days.

Part spiritual redeemer, part rubish tourist, the saint, described by the filmmaker as ‘a very sweet, naive guy,’ knows things have changed in the last 2000 years and tries to be unfazed by his surroundings, but is still ‘totally freaked out’ by incidental aspects of modern life, like the speed of the lumbering, rickety van belonging to his host.

‘What it is really about in the end is a consideration of where we are today, how lost we are without any moral or spiritual underpinnings. And I can guarantee that the Catholic Church won’t bring the world out of this muddle. There will be no saint sent down to save us – we have to save ourselves,’ says Doyle.

Doyle’s love of film began early, with an immersion in 16mm home movies as a youngster in Newfoundland. Pursuing a ba in English at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ont., he ‘fell in with’ a crowd of filmmakers, who opened his eyes to art-house cinema. A year-long course in filmmaking at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto followed, complemented by his involvement with the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-operative – organized as a resource pool by filmmakers who wished to remain in Newfoundland – once he returned to The Rock.

Since then, his main involvement with film has been the director’s duties on two half-hour dramas: Season on the Water and The Bourgeois Legacy.

The story of the extraordinary visitor – made on a $1.9-million budget patched together with funding from Telefilm Canada, the cbc, the Canadian Television Fund and Enterprise Newfoundland and Labrador, and produced by Film East partners Paul Pope and Jennice Ripley – is itself spun off from one of Doyle’s early short films. In the 1982 10-minute work, Mary Walsh and Andy Jones, real-life partners at the time, played the young couple who host the earth-bound saint. When it came to casting, Doyle was delighted to find both actors were fortuitously willing and available to reprise their earlier roles. Fiona MacDonald

* Franco Dragone

Alegria

Alegria may be Franco Dragone’s feature film debut, making him eligible for this year’s Claude Jutra honors, but the Italian-born artist-of-many-media is no stranger either to directing or to motion pictures.

Described as the ‘creative soul and director at Cirque du Soleil since 1985’ on the Cirque website, Dragone has been a key builder of the franchise and led the crew and troupe of performers through ‘most of the Cirque’s stage productions, including La Magic continue (1986); Le Cirque reinvente (1987); Nouvelle Experience (1990); Saltimbanco (1992)…; Mystere (a permanent show in Las Vegas since 1993); Alegria (1994), and Quidam (1996).’

In addition to his extensive work on the stage productions, Dragone has made a few motion picture segues, all the while lengthening the artistic reach of the Cirque into new media. According to the web notes, Dragone directed a music video of a song from the Saltimbanco soundtrack – for which he received a MuchMusic nomination for best video. In 1995, he moved to film in a collaboration with Norman Jewison. Jewison was making Bogus at the time and worked with Dragone on a dream sequence which featured performers from the Cirque.

Alegria, shot on location in Amsterdam and Berlin, was written by producer Rudy Barichello in collaboration with Dragone. The story, spectacularly backlit by the ambiance of the Cirque, follows the love affair between a street mime and a singer, the daughter of the man who runs the circus.

Cast includes Rene Bazinet (Saltimbanco), Frank Langella (Lolita, Eddie) as the circus boss, and Julie Cox (Franz Kafka’s What a Wonderful World) as his daughter.

Alegria is a Canada/France/Holland coproduction from Lampo Di Vita Films of Montreal, Paris-based Mainstream and Amsterdam’s Egmond. The film’s coproducers are Barichello, Stephane Reichel, Alexandre Heylen and Hans de Weers. Funding sources included the old cable fund (ctcpf) and Telefilm Canada’s Equity Investment Program. Susan Tolusso

* Jean-Philippe Duval

Matroni et Moi

Matroni et Moi is a feature film adaptation of a 1995 stageplay of the same name by Alexis Martin. Described as ‘an absurdist comedy set against a philosophical thriller,’ this first feature from director Jean-Philippe Duval was released in late 1998.

The stageplay was adapted for the screen by Duval and Martin, who, interestingly, also takes a lead role in the film, along with Pierre Lebeau as Matroni, Guylaine Tremblay, Gary Boudreault and Pierre Curzi. With a cast of zany characters, the story centres on Gilles, an idealistic student with iron-clad ethics, who has just completed a thesis on the death of God.

He falls in love with Guylaine, a barmaid, and influences her until she returns to school in order to change her apparently drab, predictable future. She neglects, however, to consult her brother, Bob, a minor thug in the employ of Mr. Matroni, a feared and respected Mafioso. Car chases and shoot-outs – amid deep philosophical ponderings and revelations – ensue.

Matroni et Moi had a wide release in Quebec and a p&a budget of approximately $400,000.

Director Jean-Philippe Duval has written and directed several films since his career began in 1988, including the short film La nuit, tous les chats sont gris (1989), which was nominated for best short film at the Rendez-vous du cinema quebecois in Montreal. He also wrote and directed the Prix Gemeaux-winning tv movie Soho (1993), a documentary called L’Odyssee baroque: les dix ans du Cirque du Soleil (1994) and L’Enfant des Appalaches (1996), a tv movie which received two Gemeaux nominations in 1997.

The financing and distribution of Matroni et Moi was part of an output deal between Max Films producer Roger Frappier and Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, which has domestic and international rights.

Director Duval’s credits include the doc La Vie a du charme and Soho.

Luc Vandal produced Matroni et Moi with Frappier and Andre Turpin was the shoot’s cinematographer. Louise Leger

* Mary Jane Gomes

Angel in a Cage

Mary Jane Gomes took on a huge task with her self-penned directorial debut, Angel in a Cage. Set among Portuguese winemakers in the Caribbean in the ’30s, the film is both a location piece and a period piece, challenging for more experienced filmmakers but especially so for a first-timer.

The interiors were shot in Toronto in winter, partially in Gomes’ apartment, which, with the addition of shutters and lattices and lighting suggestive of tropical heat, successfully stood in for the Caribbean, even though it was 40¡ below outside.

Gomes, who also acted as producer, is cagey about the exact budget, but says her film was made on less than is usual for first-time efforts. Angel received funding from the Arts Councils of Ontario and Canada, cbc, Telefilm Canada and the cable fund. It is produced by Gomes’ Audacine and is distributed through Cinema Esperanca. On the modest budget, a 30-member Canadian crew shot for two weeks in Trinidad and Tobago, and went over budget by a total of $138.

The film was written by Gomes as the back story to another script of hers. Both scripts and the third in the series concern themselves with pieces of her family history. Angel in a Cage is based on the life of her grandmother, who died at 23.

‘The film is about the tragic loss of a woman’s life in her early twenties. In some ways things have changed so much since then, and in some ways things haven’t changed at all.’

In a quest for authenticity, Gomes has the characters speak throughout the film in a broken English patois. Gomes says she has received both criticism and praise for using the device, but merely thinks of it as being true to the way Madeirans [Portuguese immigrants] in Trinidad at the time would have spoken. Patois, which Gomes describes as ‘a very musical language,’ mixes up verbs and nouns and poetic touches so that something as mundane as ‘It’s raining outside’ becomes ‘Rain falling’.

Gomes acknowledges that it seems to take the Canadian ear a while to attune to the language, but says even without a full grasp of the dialect, the viewer is unlikely to lose the story.

Gomes’ ‘fell in love with filmmaking’ while studying film as part of a media course she was taking at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto. A degree in applied arts in filmmaking from Ryerson was followed by a Masters in interdisciplinary studies in film and political thought from York University. A cross-Canada trip that formed the basis of her thesis also provided her with material for three documentaries. Fiona MacDonald

* John Kalangis

Jack and Jill

John Kalangis started moves towards getting his script Jack and Jill made in 1995 – in an effort to interest a producer he shot a 10-minute trailer of sample scenes for the film he would end up directing. ‘When you see the characters and hear their voices any questions get answered,’ he says.

In fact, the sample film ended up working so well as a sales tool that Kalangis received an offer for his script. ‘It was a strange moment when I decided not to sell it, but I’m really pleased to have held on to it.’

Two years after that trailer was made, once all the elements were in place, the film was shot in 13 days, necessitating intense organization and what Kalangis calls an ‘insane schedule.’

‘We rehearsed like crazy beforetime so everything that ended up in the film is either take one or two. We just didn’t have the film stock or the time to go over.’

Actors, thinking on their feet, contributed to a few nice moments – one being the scene where Shauna MacDonald, playing Jill, spits gum into Jack’s face – which Kalangis calls his favorite scene in the movie.

Kalangis, who plays Jack in the film, has a long history of stage and screen craft, starting with kindergarten, when he was asked to be in his first play – unsurprisingly, a comedy. Ever since, comedy ‘kept coming up,’ he says. ‘People kept thinking I was funny.’

Indeed, the function of his directorial debut was to add something lighthearted to Canadian filmmaking. ‘One of the intentions of Jack and Jill was to make out of this film another color. It’s about human behavior and the audience having some fun. It doesn’t have to be depressing and dark. We wanted to put something out there that would be fun.’

Kalangis’ training in film includes a degree in English and Film from the University of Western Ontario and a summer course in filmmaking at nyu. He directed the comedy troupe Urban Myth and continued to act in dramatic roles even while pitching Jack and Jill.

He is now at the Canadian Film Centre studying new media. ‘It’s neat to be working in a field with so few rules,’ he says. ‘There are no set esthetics like there are in film and television.’

His new media project at the cfcf’s MediaLinx H@bitat, threeway.org, is interactive, placing the ‘viewer’ in the lead character’s head, and aims to examine the user’s psychology ‘because their choices will affect the esthetics of the experience.’

Also in the works is a film called The Week Bernice’s Computer Broke Down, a black comedy set in the near future ‘about leaving one’s comfort zone and being swept up by the force of life.’

Enviably for a first-time filmmaker was the resource of Atom Egoyan, who ended up executive producing. ‘Simone [Urdl, the film’s coproducer with Jennifer Weiss and Meredith Vuchnich] was working for him and used him as a resource. She showed him the script and tape. He liked the trailer and was behind us as a trigger to get going. He was a huge help.’

Financing for Jack and Jill was patched together on what Kalangis describes as a scale model of larger films. ‘tmn was our first investor, Alliance Atlantis is the distributor, Telefilm provided half the budget, and there was also the Harold Greenberg Fund. It was a very standard financing structure. ‘What was weird was they weren’t used to dealing with films at this level – making rather than buying low-budget movies.’ Fiona MacDonald

* Rob King

Something More

You may remember those old Molson’s Ex commercials, feel-good spots about Fred and the boys who got together weekends for some pick-up football and a beer chaser.

Remember them?

Good. Now forget ’em.

And lose any ill-conceived notions about Canada’s male-bonding sport being hockey. In Something More, director Rob King’s romantic comedy Jutra entry, the slam-dunk pastime for twentysomething x-y chromosomes is basketball. Church league b-ball on the prairies, in which ‘the boys’ share hoop dreams and relationship nightmares.

The subject of women and relationships, says King, ‘is affecting the chemistry of the team.’ Things go further off-kilter when a new woman comes to town and two of the teammates fall for her.

Shot on location in Regina in the summer of ’97, Something More has a budget somewhat less than $3 million. Coproducers are Kevin DeWalt of Minds Eye and Maureen MacDonald of Eighty-Seven Bear Images, both based in Saskatchewan. Peter Bryant wrote the script and co-executive produced with DeWalt. Principal actors are Vancouverite David Lovgren (rollercoaster), Edmontonian Chandra West (Revenge of the Land) and American Michael Goorjian (Party of Five, Hard Rain). King notes that Jennifer Beals (Flashdance, Devil in a Blue Dress) does a ‘wonderful’ cameo.

‘I infused my own sense of humor in [the film] throughout. I was determined to make it look like a $10-million to $15-million film made south of the border,’ says King. ‘It was a great experience in that I finally got to do a feature and I got to do it with people I’d grown up with in the industry.’ He does note that working with an ensemble cast is challenging and time consuming. ‘The longest thing I’d done up ’til then was a half-hour. It was like training for a five-kilometre run and then doing a marathon.’

King says Alliance Atlantis picked up distribution rights when it bought the Norstar library. The new distrib put the 95-minute production through a round of focus testing, added more music and did a recut before releasing Something More theatrically in about 55 cinemas across Canada, during Toronto festival madness, last September. Susan Tolusso

* Bruce McCulloch

Dog Park

Bruce McCulloch is a name and a face well known in Canadian film and television circles, even before the release of his directorial debut. Dog Park, which could snag McCulloch a Claude Jutra, concerns modern dating mores of urban thirtysomethings, and stars Natasha Henstridge, Janeane Garofalo and Bruce himself.

Produced by Susan Cavan and funded by Telefilm Canada, Lions Gate and Accent, the film, which McCulloch wrote, had its genesis in his meditations on being unattached in Los Angeles. In a recent interview, he said that as a single in La-la Land he found himself ‘part of a community of people who kind of put their love into their dogs.’

He continued: ‘If you know my work in the Kids in the Hall or my plays or whatever, you’ll know I have an obsession with relationships, so I just started mining all that stuff. Also with what was kind of going on with me at the time, the result is much more soulful, though that’s a weird word.’

Dog Park has already been followed up in theatres by another McCulloch-directed comedy. Superstar, based on a Saturday Night Live character, stars Molly Shannon, fellow snl cast member Will Ferrell and fellow one-time Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney.

The past year was a time of considerable exposure for McCulloch, who also appeared on the big screen in his capacity as actor in the Nixon-era comedy Dick, playing Watergate investigator Carl Bernstein to two teenage Deep Throats. Also in 1999 was his stage show, Slightly Bigger Cities, performed with former Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet guitarist Brian Connelly, which the Edmonton native has described as being about ‘living in Los Angeles and trying to decide if I should stay.

‘Part of the notion of the show is that when you are growing up in Calgary and Edmonton… you wouldn’t dream of moving to Toronto or Vancouver unless you were a different kind of person. And a lot of my friends did that. And once they moved there they started thinking about moving to bigger cities, wondering if they should move to New York or Los Angeles.’

Prior to Dog Park, McCulloch was probably best known for his role in the Toronto-based comedy troupe Kids In The Hall, with whom he appeared in his first feature film, Brain Candy. The Kids also gave McCulloch his first taste of directing, on some of the series’ short films. These efforts were followed up with Coleslaw Warehouse, a half-hour short that producer Cavan says is ‘an ode to the demise of small businesses,’ and four short films made for Saturday Night Live. Fiona MacDonald

* Stephen Reynolds

The Divine Ryans

The Divine Ryans, set in mid-sixties Newfoundland, follows a 10-year-old boy who has just lost his father to suicide, and has no memory of the week of his father’s death. The boy is the clan’s last male heir and the remnants of the family do all they can to manipulate him and his mother into fitting him into the mold of succession to take over their crumbling mini-empire of businesses.

‘It’s really about redemption, forgiveness, love, greed, selfishness and fascism in the family,’ says first-time director and Claude Jutra contender Stephen Reynolds.

‘It’s very well told. At the root of it is a really good story. Really good characters, situations and premise. All I could think was, ‘I’ve been given my first film and it’s a really good script. All I have to do is cast it and not mess it up.’ ‘

His goal was a film that was true to the story, scripted by Wayne Johnston from his novel of the same name, underscored by the fact that Reynolds could identify closely with the source material. Just like his main character, he lost his father at age 10 in the mid-sixties and was raised in a Catholic Maritime milieu. He was even a fan of the same hockey team as his young hero.

Reynolds’ involvement with the film began in his summers off from his photography and mixed-media course at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, during which he was fortunate enough to have a job shooting locations for possible productions and ‘hosting’ the interested producers when they hit town. One of these hosting jobs turned into a short-term pa gig, and Reynolds was irrevocably bitten by the filmmaking bug. His initial experience proved enough to get him on board locally based productions, including projects from Salter Street in its early days.

Reynolds’ plan was to ‘climb the ladder to become a producer’ and then hire himself as a director. With that in mind, he line produced for several years before switching to assistant directing on ‘a number of great Canadian pictures,’ including Margaret’s Museum, When Night Is Falling and I Love A Man in Uniform.

Three years after Reynolds worked with Chris Zimmer of Halifax-based imX communications on Margaret’s Museum, Zimmer, who knew of Reynolds’ directorial ambitions, approached him with the script for The Divine Ryans. The film was coproduced by Zimmer, Wolfram Tichy of Germany’s TiMe Film and TV Produktions and Bob Petrie, with Red Sky Entertainment distributing.

The $4-million budget was composed of grants from the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, the Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation, Telefilm Canada, private financing through imX, TiMe (through which the filmmakers were able to access the Brandenberg Film Fund), and broadcaster Vision tv. Fiona MacDonald

* Curtis Wehrfritz

Four Days

For five years, director Curtis Wehrfritz waded in the ‘incredibly difficult’ muck clogging the path to a first dramatic feature. Acclaimed as a commercial and music video director, Wehrfritz was quickly hooked once introduced to the John Buell novel which inspired his first feature, Four Days.

‘I…found the theme of the kid’s identity search being firmly tied to the spirit of his dead father fascinating…

‘It was clear that it would be a film primarily concerned with traditional storytelling and would be structured in a stripped-down and unadorned fashion. My past reputation has been formed around an ability to work with visual tableaux and I wanted to put that aside somewhat to learn some fundamentals about story.’

The film was coproduced on a $3-million budget by Montreal’s Cite-Amerique and Dummett Films of Toronto. Miroslaw Baszak shot, and screenplay credit goes to author Pinckney Benedict (Dogs of God).

Says Wehrfritz of the ‘first feature’ scenario: ‘One of the skills a first-time director has in spades is his naivete. This is not necessarily a bad thing as you face the monster of a first film….Certainly all of the footage I had put through the gate in music videos and commercials was very useful because it allowed me not to be distracted by technical issues and concentrate on the new dynamics of actors and storytelling.’

The filmmakers, he notes, ‘looked at the story as a three-act play that was presented in the form of a road movie. Each of the characters [is] defined by monologues outlining their personal nemesis, and as we watch them crash through life we are meant to understand that each of them [is] noble and humorous in their own dark way.’

Shrunken feature budgets might not inspire nobility in all, but Wehrfritz isn’t fazed. ‘It seems to me there are two types of work possible: less money, more freedom, and hopefully risks paying off on screen; or more money to raise the level of production to cover everything the story demands.’

What’s next for less money? ‘Two new stories,’ he says. ‘One based on a 22-year-old girl who steals cars and makes money in drug testing programs, and the second based on an erotic ghost story.’ Susan Tolusso