Burns making ‘Perfect’ doc

Calgary – With credits including The Suburbanators and A Problem with Fear, Alberta filmmaker Gary Burns often tackles the theme of how the environment affects us. So when you think about it, Perfect, his new film about suburban sprawl, isn’t such a stretch, even though it is the director’s first shot at a feature documentary.

Produced by Burns Films in association with the National Film Board, Perfect is a collaboration between Burns and his codirector/cowriter, Jim Brown, host of the CBC Radio Calgary morning show Eye Opener. Burns’ longtime producer Shirley Vercruysse (waydowntown) says Brown’s prowess as an interviewer mixed with Burns’ directorial eye is ‘yielding some very interesting stuff.’

‘Life in the suburbs and suburban sprawl is kind of a dry subject, so we wanted to make sure that the film is visually very arresting and entertaining for people,’ she says.

Vercruysse is producing with the NFB’s Bonnie Thompson (Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole). Graydon McCrea, executive producer from the NFB, says there is no better place to begin production than in Alberta, which has seen a lot of suburban progress stemming from Calgary in recent years.

‘Anyone who has ever driven through the outskirts of that community cannot help but be struck by the endless miles of farmland that have been consumed by this unrolling carpet of suburbia,’ he says.

McCrea thinks the NFB’s effort to get more involved in long-form projects again made the timing of this doc, if you can excuse the pun, perfect.

‘[The recent expansion] made me, as an executive producer, more confident that this would be a better fit for the organization than it may have been five years ago,’ says McCrea.

The 15-day Alberta leg of the shoot wrapped in mid-October. The production will soon move to Toronto and then various locations in the U.S.

Funding for the modestly budgeted doc has come from the CBC, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Canadian Television Fund and the NFB. The film board looks to receive the finished product in the spring and take Perfect on a theatrical run before the CBC airs it. Vercruysse is hoping to do a festival run as well. Dustin Dinoff