Director of photography Kim Derko recently finished directing and shooting the Sienna Films one-hour CBC special FemCab, spotlighting the annual International Women’s Day fundraiser of the same name. Staged at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre, the longstanding cabaret features 13 feminist comics, singers, authors and dancers strutting their stuff for five minutes apiece.

That Derko should be behind the camera for this particular project is only fitting, as she is one of only three female cinematographers (and one camera operator) listed in Toronto’s IATSE Local 667. She admits that on more than one occasion prospective collaborators have called asking for "Mr. Derko." But after getting beyond that initial awkward moment, Derko says, it’s been business as usual on the set.

Derko graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr College of Art & Design, where she initially studied art history, color theory and photography.

A fourth-year video class instructor informed her about the National Film Board’s Studio D in Montreal, where they trained women to do "unusual" jobs, the male-dominated craft of cinematography falling under that classification. She was accepted as an apprentice and worked as camera assistant on numerous documentaries, but more interested in shooting drama, relocated to Toronto.

The DOP began lensing low-budget music videos before easing into drama. Her feature credits include the Canadian Film Centre Feature Film Project’s Clutch and The Highwayman, a dark comic thriller starring Jason Priestley that balances bank heists and romance.

Her new film is The Law of Enclosures, directed by John Greyson (Zero Patience, Lilies). The film stars Sarah Polley, Brendan Fletcher, Diane Ladd and Sean McCann in an unusual love story tracing 40 years in the lives of a couple who are permanently stuck in the year 1991.

In the following article, Derko details her experience collaborating with Greyson, shooting in Winnipeg, and working with some pretty ugly furniture. Mark Dillon

John Greyson and I knew each other from the arts community, and I think that’s really the connector when we work together. He asked me to be the cinematographer on some of his short films years before either he had directed or I had shot a feature. (Of course, he went on to make Lilies and other features.) I hooked up with him again a few years later to make Uncut, a dance film shot at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The low-budget feature originated on video and transferred to film. Then he pulled me into The Law of Enclosures.

I knew some of John’s work from before he moved into film, when he made political video art. We have a kind of communication shorthand we can use because of similar art school training in articulating aesthetic ideas. But don’t get the idea it was all artsy dialogue, berets and double-tall lattes when it came to creating a style for The Law of Enclosures.

The style of Enclosures really flowed from the writing in Dale Peck’s novel on which the film is based. It’s very clean storytelling – so clean it hurts when things get brutally honest. John was keen on keeping this feeling in the photography and not romanticizing things.

It was a grueling 23-day shoot, second-unit days included. We had a zillion unit moves and had to repo very quickly. Many of our decisions about the visuals were made due to practical constraints. For example, swing/shift lenses would have been excellent for isolating sharp areas – emphasizing what a certain character "sees" – but with our schedule and budget the swing/shifts were just too time-consuming to employ.

John liked the idea of shallow depth of field, so we went another route. We used the Zeiss Ultra Primes that had just arrived in Toronto last year, which, besides looking great, provided a solution to our shallow focus idea. We often shot at T1.9 on longer lenses, and I teased focus puller Chris Dyson about this challenge. But he handled it without a problem, and then I would give him a break by using a 14mm Zeiss that naturally has much more depth of field. The film jumps between the 14mm and 85mm-135mm without many in-between lenses.

We shot on Fuji 8552 stock, which worked well with the film’s strange palette. The exteriors on Fuji are great. We used a Moviecam Super America II (a giant tank of a camera) and the more current Moviecam Compact. The latter was initially a second camera we used for hand-held and Steadicam work, although we ended up using it nearly all the time. I learned later that the Compact became commonly used around 1991, the year in which Enclosures takes place.

The film is set in both Sarnia, ON and the Persian Gulf. We shot in Winnipeg, which admirably stood in for both locales. Despite using numerous locations, our unit moves around the city were close together and we didn’t lose as much time in transit as we might have elsewhere. We flew to Sarnia for exterior shots of oil refineries, skylines, and the border bridge to the U.S. We did some time-lapse work, one of my favorite things to shoot.

At the oil refineries we shot single-frame stuff such as bucolic wafts of smoke and steam rising from the poisonous plant smokestacks and clouds tracing shadows across giant refinery architecture. It works in the film as a wonderful contradiction – seductive landscapes of deadly mega-corporations.

National stir-fry

I was initially worried about jumping into such a demanding production schedule with a crew I hadn’t worked with before, but Winnipeg gaffer Michael Drabot and grip Francois Balcaen really came through. My camera team was from Vancouver; the gear was from William F. White in Toronto and PS Production Services in Winnipeg. It was a real national stir-fry.

Francois came up with a crazy "bungee-cam" rig to float our Moviecam down through two stories of giant tubes in a water park, eventually landing on a shot of Sarah Polley and Brendan Fletcher necking in one of the tubes. It is a splendid example of doing something quickly and simply that couldn’t have been done with any kind of expensive crane or rigging simply because of the blocking and geography of the water park.

The film’s 1991 setting posed many challenges. John and I talked about films released that year but didn’t find any that captured the look we envisaged, despite the fact many were amazing: Delicatessen, Life is Sweet, The Double Life of Veronique (we’re both big Kieslowski fans) and The Adjuster. Enclosures actually resembles Fargo more than Delicatessen. John and I also went back to Kieslowski’s The Decalogue series, which we used as a model in terms of keeping it simple and honest. This was convenient in terms of our schedule and budget restraints but served as good inspiration as well.

The year was hard to reproduce – it’s not long enough ago to be cool in a retro way, and some of the key art direction was hard to find. Production designer Rejean Labrie would ask me what I thought about some detail he’d be devising in the art direction and I’d cringe at the physical design of objects – or more often the colors!

Eventually I realized that all those working-class fuchsia acrylic sweaters, acid-washed jeans and black-with-chrome dining room furniture pieces were perfectly accurate. Rejean nailed a really difficult period to depict. We want to love everything in the frame aesthetically, but for Enclosures that didn’t always suit the story and we’d have to embrace the sometimes-ugly designs of 1991. Making everything precious and fashionable for today would have in a sense hurt the story.

The Law of Enclosures, coproduced by Damon D’Oliveira of Toronto’s Pluck Inc. and Phyllis Laing of Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures, is an Odeon Films release that has opened in Winnipeg and opens in Toronto March 23. *