* Writer/director: Jerry Ciccoritti
* Producers: Anna Gerb, Joel Awerbuck
* Cast: Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierney

Based on the Tom Walmsley play of the same name (originally produced at Toronto’s Factory Theatre), Blood is a searing drama about a heroin-addicted prostitute named Noelle and her long-absent ex-junkie brother Chris. Toronto’s Now magazine succinctly summed up Blood’s plot line when the play was staged by Theatre Passe Muraille this year: ‘Just released from jail and in need of some cash for a quick fix, Noelle is expecting a customer for a three-way when her brother Chris shows up at her door. Will Chris, who has got some unfinished business with his sister, sleep with her so they can split the $500?’

‘It’s a black comedy about family ties,’ says Toronto writer/director Jerry Ciccoritti, who has established himself as one of Canada’s preeminent directors of TV dramas, including minis Lives of the Saints and Trudeau.

The siblings haven’t seen each other for five years. Noelle’s a junkie, while Chris, having ‘gotten out of the life,’ is now an alcoholic instead. ‘Chris shows up out of the blue to help save her from her life. The two spend the day together verbally and physically hashing things out: their desire for junk [heroin], each other, God, and trying to know what it is they both actually want from life,’ Ciccoritti says.

‘At one point, Noelle asks Chris what alcoholism is like. He replies that, ‘after junk, booze is like kissing your sister.’ Life is a lot like this – you spend all this time trying to find out what you want and then trying to get it. Unfortunately, what you end up with pales by comparison.’

Blood is the second Walmsley piece that Ciccoritti has taken to film. The first was Paris, France, another story about junkies. ‘Actually, all of Walmsley’s plays have junkies in them,’ Ciccoritti says. ‘He uses them as tools in order to explore a number of themes.’

From a production standpoint, Blood, with a bargain-basement budget of $125,000, is about continuous flow. Eager to try out HD video and finding his schedule open in March, Ciccoritti decided to shoot Blood from start to finish in a series of continuous edit-free takes.

‘We did two takes a day over the span of a week,’ he says. ‘One take we might play it funny; the next as tragic. The third would be slow; the fourth fast; the fifth with a Jewish accent – and so on. This gave me a lot to work with, without interrupting the flow.’

Shooting Blood in an end-to-end fashion using two dolly-mounted cameras made for fast work. ‘It did complicate the process of giving notes, though,’ Ciccoritti admits. ‘I mean, you can’t exactly say to the actors, ‘Thirty-five minutes from now, I want you to pick up the book with your left hand.”

From their standpoint, producers Anna Gerb and Joel Awerbuck of Toronto-based Spank Films, better known as producers of commercial spots, got involved simply because the film struck a chord.

‘Although our main business is TV commercials, our goal is to shoot two ‘passion projects’ each year,’ says Gerb. ‘Coming from really tight, close-knit families, we related to the themes and emotions that go on between brothers and sisters. Where you can go for the jugular one minute and still love them the next – nothing is thicker or more binding – we live, breathe and die by our blood.’

At press time, it remained unclear as to when Blood would make its debut on CBC, The Movie Network and Movie Central, its broadcast investors. However, given the film’s appearance at TIFF, ‘it looks like we’ll be on the festival circuit showing it around for the next nine or 10 months,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘After that, we’ll see what happens.’

1995: Blood is first produced as a play at Toronto’s Factory Theatre.

November 2003: While wrapping up the CTV miniseries Lives of the Saints with Sophia Loren, director Jerry Ciccoritti decides to use some free time in his schedule in March getting to know the language of HDTV production by shooting Blood. ‘HD is different from film,’ Ciccoritti says. ‘For instance, when the shot is black, it’s black. You can’t color correct your way out of the problem.’

Ciccoritti meets with Spank Films’ Anna Gerb and Joel Awerbuck. They buy into the script, and the three start shopping around for investors. ‘Joel and I have been wanting to make a film with Jerry for some time, and then one sunny fall day he called asking us to consider bringing the play Blood to the screen. We read it and immediately felt a connection,’ says Gerb.

Feb. 20, 2004: The subject matter and shooting style of Blood keeps investors at bay. Frustrated, Ciccoritti e-mails his partners, telling them that he expects the shoot to fall through. Out of desperation, Ciccoritti calls Slawko Klymkiw, executive director of network programming for CBC Television, ‘even though it wasn’t clear where CBC would be able to fit a 90-minute commercial-free film into its schedule,’ Ciccoritti says. Out of respect for Ciccoritti’s reputation and body of work, Klymkiw unexpectedly kicks in $50,000. The producers then turn to Shelley Gillen of Movie Central and Michelle Marion of The Movie Network to match. Gillen agrees to throw in $45,000, while Marion comes to the table with $30,000.

March 2004: Ciccoritti and his small crew build their set at Toronto’s @Wallace Studios. Actors Emily Hampshire (A Problem with Fear) and Jacob Tierney (Twist) start learning 96 pages of script. By the third week of March, shooting begins and runs five days. (Second unit footage was also shot in Montreal for two days.) ‘We used two cameras on dollies, moving in a gentle, almost 1960s European fashion,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘We wanted the sense of continuous time, but not the handheld jerky camera look that has been so overdone lately.’

April 2004: Blood is edited at Toronto’s Tattersall Sound and Picture and Fearless Films.

June 2004: Jane Tattersall works on sound design and Robert Carli composes the score.

July to August 2004: Deluxe Sound & Picture works on the picture’s color correction, online and sound mix.

August 2004: Blood is selected for TIFF in the Visions program.

September 2004: Blood premiers at TIFF. Afterwards, it will be screened at the Atlantic and Sudbury festivals.