Chandler Levack’s feature film Anglophone won Toronto’s Zapruder Films Women First screenwriting competition.

The prodco behind Operation Avalanche and the upcoming nirvanna the band the show, launched the competition during the Toronto International Film Festival to help address the gender gap in the feature film industry.

“We work with a lot of men on the films we’ve done and the feature we’re currently making, although we do work with some wonderful women as well. But we felt like we wanted to go out of our way to seek out emerging female talent,” Zapruder producer Matthew Miller told Playback Daily.

Offering the winner a $12,000 investment (the company’s 2016/2017 Telefilm development funds) and the services of a professional story editor, the competition was open to Canadian women who had not yet written a produced feature-length screenplay.

“When we set out to do it, we thought 50 [applications] would be a really incredible number,” said Miller.

It seems they aimed too low. In total, Miller and Zapruder’s Matt Johnson waded through 137 applications, reading treatments in airports and hotel rooms as they traveled to promote Operation Avalanche.

“It was completely overwhelming and surprising in the best possible way and really speaks to the women out there who are dying for and deserve opportunities,” Miller said.

While Miller noted that choosing one project to support was really difficult, Levack’s “true voice” stood out, said Miller. Levack is a Toronto-based writer and journalist who wrote the 2013 short Lunchbox Loser.  

He added that another important aspect that drew the company to Levack’s feature  – a romantic comedy set in Montreal’s Mile End – was that Zapruder could actually help bring it to life.

“Some of the projects we read were really fantastic, but the scope of them was bigger than something that we felt we could see through to the end. The production level that we could utilize to make a film like [Levack’s] is actually similar to something we employed on Matt’s first film The Dirties,” he explained. “That was also exciting, because we didn’t want to just run a contest, give somebody $12,000 to write a script and then have that project sit in what we call ‘development hell’ forever.”

Within the next six to eight weeks, Zapruder hopes to pair Levack with a story editor who will work with her on developing the first draft. By next spring, the company is hoping to have a finished first draft of the feature and at that point turn its attention toward making the film.

The demand for a program like this is evident. Whether Zapruder will offer the competition again is still up in the air – “definitely maybe,” said Miller – but the company did call on other production companies to follow their lead.

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