Director/writer/producer/cinematographer: Andrea Dorfman * Diary by: Dustin Dinoff

Andrea Dorfman, a Toronto native who has been working primarily as a camera assistant in Halifax, makes her feature film debut with the very low-budget ($65,000) Parsley Days.

The story of a first love and its break-up, Parsley Days follows Kate (played by Megan Dunlop), a bicycle maintenance instructor who decides she can no longer be with her significant other, Ollie (Michael LeBlanc), because she does not love him.

Just before she breaks off their relationship, Kate discovers she is pregnant. She does not, under any circumstances, want to keep the baby. Not content to wait until the pregnancy is far enough along to have an abortion, she takes to eating parsley, which she is told by a friend has abortive qualities.

January 1998: Dorfman goes to Toronto to edit a pair of shorts and ends up staying for six weeks. ‘It was kind of hard editing these films so I went to the resource library and figured I was going to start writing again,’ she says. ‘I spent half the day reading screenplays and reading scriptwriting books. I did this for about six weeks and kind of mapped out what [Parsley Days] would be and what it would be about.’

Spring 1998: Dorfman has to abandon her project for approximately six months because of her commitments to finishing the two films she went to Toronto to work on.

Fall 1998: Dorfman commits herself to finishing the Parsley Days screenplay and applies to various agencies for funding.

January 1999: One year in, Dorfman completes the first draft of the script.

March 1999: Dorfman receives $50,000 in funding from the Canada Council toward production of Parsley Days.

April 1999: Realizing that she needs more money for the film, Dorfman applies to Telefilm Canada for further funding. ‘I didn’t think I’d make a film as big and as long as it ended up being,’ says Dorfman.

May 1999: Dorfman receives $15,000 from Telefilm. The budget is set, and remains at $65,000.

Early summer 1999: Dorfman begins casting Parsley Days, originally hoping to utilize actra. She finds that because of her budget she can not afford to go with actra talent.

‘I had to go entirely non-actra, and in a lot of cases non-actor,’ says the filmmaker. ‘I had a combination of theatre actors, friends who just wanted to act and people who I roped into it. Although the acting is pretty amateur, I think it fits the whole vibe of the film, which is low-budget, independent, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.’

Summer 1999: Production begins on Parsley Days in Halifax. The shoot lasts 11 days. With her cinematographer’s hat on, Dorfman decides to shoot the film on Super 16 to keep production costs down.

‘We shot it on Super 16 in the hopes that there would be reason to blow it up to 35mm,’ admits Dorfman. ‘Super 16 is sort of a non-format because you can’t project it. It’s the cheap version of making a 35mm film, so you shoot it in Super 16, where the gate is a little bigger than regular 16mm. Then you blow it up to 35mm. A lot of low-budget features are built with this sort of model.’

Fall 1999: After production on Parsley Days wraps, Dorfman declares herself ‘completely broke’ and begins working again as a camera assistant on the children’s series Pit Pony. This proves to be a shock to her system.

‘I went from being at the helm of this crazy unwieldy ship to being a clapper loader on a kids tv series,’ she laughs.

Spring 2000: Editing and post-production on the film begin in Halifax.

July 2000: Dorfman learns Parsley Days is accepted into the Toronto International Film Festival, much to her delight.

As she had hoped a year earlier, Dorfman transfers the film from Super 16 to 35mm. ‘It is pretty overwhelming in the sense that we are in the mad dash to blow it up to 35mm, doing all the technical adjustments and blowing up, which is sort of crazy because it has to be done for the festival in a month,’ she says.

September 2000: Parsley Days has its world premiere at tiff. *