Montreal: After touring the film-festival circuit with his first two features, Summer (2002) and Hatley High (2003), Montreal-based filmmaker Phil Price found plenty of inspiration for comedy.

That inspiration turned into The Festival, a six-part mockumentary series in which first-time film-maker Rufus Marquez (played by The Greatest Game Ever Played’s Nicolas Wright) finds himself invited to a small film festival to screen his movie, titled The Unreasonable Truth of Butterflies. While at the festival, he’s followed around by a lesbian documentary filmmaker, who in turn is making a portrait of Marquez.

With an eye on the absurd, Price’s idea found legs south of the border. The Independent Film Channel in the U.S. commissioned a six-ep season of the show, which shot entirely in Montreal. With producer Brandi-Ann Milbradt, also part of Price’s prodco Philms Pictures, and a shoestring budget of $850,000, the director set about to pack as much absurd hilarity as possible into each episode.

‘We have been really proud of the fact that we’ve been using local talent,’ Price adds. The series also features Canuck thesps Miranda Handford (Tripping the Wire) and James A. Woods (Hatley High). It wrapped last year and premiered in August on IFC, to rave reviews in The Wall Street Journal and The Hollywood Reporter, which called The Festival ‘everything a mock documentary should be: sassy, glib, subtle, biting and consistently hilarious.’

No faint praise. ‘We were really happy with the response,’ says Price.

The Festival was the first show to be commissioned by the IFC for broadcast, and reaction was so strong that a second season, expanded to eight episodes and with a budget of $1 million, will begin shooting in March. Price, who both helms and heads the writing team, which also includes Philms’ Myles Hainsworth, says his main models have been Arrested Development and the British series The Office.

‘If we can come close to the genius of those shows, I’m happy,’ he says.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and Price says he has had to remove some aspects of the scripts simply because they were too unbelievable.

‘There were things that were happening to us when we were on the festival circuit that were really, really strange,’ he reports. ‘I thought about putting them in the show, but they were just too unbelievable. No one would have bought it.’

Canadians will finally get a peek at the first season of The Festival this March, when it will be broadcast on The Movie Network.

‘I guess we’ve done the whole thing backwards – going to the U.S. first, then coming back to Canada,’ Price says. ‘We really didn’t want to go through the ordeal of having to apply for funding from Telefilm and SODEC. We’re really committed to Montreal, but we just really wanted to move ahead and get the show done. The IFC has been really supportive.’

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