‘I think it’s one of Canada’s best-kept secrets,’ says director Richie Mehta of his alma mater, the Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. Mehta’s debut feature Amal premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival after special advance screenings in New York and Los Angeles.

Amal also won best Canadian first feature at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival. It is about a contented auto-rickshaw driver named Amal (Rupinder Nagra) who unknowingly impresses an eccentric billionaire (Naseeruddin Shah) who, disguised as a vagabond, is searching the streets of New Delhi, looking for human decency and a worthy recipient for his fortune.

After a special screening honoring Amal during Sheridan’s 40th anniversary celebrations in October, Mehta told Playback: ‘I don’t think people realize that [Sheridan’s] like a mini movie studio in terms of its equipment and technical resources, and the fact that the program is structured like you’re in a studio.’

Sheridan hopes to prepare filmmakers for the real world.

‘When [students] finish this program, going into the industry isn’t such a big deal,’ explains Jean Desormeaux, Sheridan’s advanced television and film program coordinator. ‘They know it’s tough and hierarchical.’

Mehta is a perfect example of a ‘really smart guy’ who ‘really used this program well,’ according to the professor. ‘We’re really proud of him.’

Desormeaux is also a filmmaker and was the formidable VP of production for Alliance Communications in the ’90s (its producing heyday), and as such, the former executive displays Sheridan’s typically no-nonsense, professional savvy.

The advanced film and TV graduate program is only seven years old, handpicking 35 to 50 students annually, then putting them through a one-year ringer that prepares wannabe filmmakers for the relentlessly competitive industry.

Desormeaux describes it as an experience that goes ‘from totalitarian to libertarian in one year,’ with learning the ropes coming prior to artistic freedom in the two-term curriculum.

In the first term, classes of 12 students ‘do a one-minute film and kind of get wet,’ Desormeaux explains. After five weeks of schoolroom classes, they have three days to make the one-minute movie, including eight hours to shoot, eight hours to digitize (and lock picture) and eight hours to finalize audio, with each student doing only one task per film.

‘Philosophically, it’s difficult enough to do one task well,’ notes the professor, adding that those one-minutes shorts – as well as the second-term short films – must all be shot on Sheridan’s sprawling campus in Oakville, ON, west of Toronto.

During a Q&A after the world premier of his film at TIFF, Mehta conceded that prior to shooting Amal entirely on location in India, he’d never shot anything outside of Oakville. ‘It was quite a change,’ he grinned, ‘but we let India tell us what to do.’

Mehta became a master of the sound-bite as well as project pitching while he learned his craft in the pragmatic college in 2001-02 (he won Telefilm Canada’s Pitch This! during TIFF 2005 with his concept for Amal).

Desormeaux says that pitching is an essential part of the program in the second school term, and that ‘everyone comes to hear them…writers, directors, producers, industry, faculty and alumni.’

Approximately 25 pitches are heard annually, but only 12 of the three-minute films actually get made. In a project nicknamed ‘the 3 x 3,’ three-minute films are chosen to be made from three scripts and have three actors, with ‘the scripts selected by well-known Toronto writers,’ according to Desormeaux.

The process resembles both a survivor game and the hierarchical film industry.

Based on the almighty pitch, ‘students pick the films they want to work on,’ Desormeaux says, ‘and they can only be fired by mediated tribunal. It’s highly regimented and rules are made very clear.’

Students then shoot the short films on state-of-the-art equipment provided by select manufacturers. ‘Our relationships with Panavision, Fujifilm and PS Production Services can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,’ notes Desormeaux.

Once they’ve made their short films, students graduate into the real world of filmmaking, then they’re on their own to sink or swim.

Mehta insists that Sheridan gives upcoming talent the best possible shot at making it in the dog-eat-dog world of motion picture production.

‘You can make the most wildly amazing imaginative films or you can get squashed under the competition,’ Mehta says. ‘And that’s like my experience in the industry so far; you can be focused and gather your resources, or you can get beaten. That’s also what I learned at Sheridan and I find that’s really fair.’