Director Nisha Platzer is headed to Cannes to bring her vision to commemorate her late brother one step closer to the international stage.

Platzer’s feature documentary, Back Home, is one of four Canadian projects chosen to go to the Cannes Film Market through Forum RIDM’s Docs-In-Progress – Canadian Showcase. It centres on her journey to learn more about her late brother who died by suicide at the age of 15 by interviewing his friends, and has been in production the last three years.

“I lost my brother, Josh, 22 years ago to suicide. I had been living away in Montreal for many, many years. Out of nowhere, however, I started to have some chronic pain issues and I couldn’t find medical solutions in Montreal and was kind of forced to come back to Vancouver,” Platzer tells Playback Daily.

“When I got here, I was going to lots of medical appointments and doing lots of tests and couldn’t find any solutions until a doctor recommended a very specific type of yoga for my pain condition. There was only one person in town who was able to do that sort of therapy and it turned out to be someone very close to my brother. That’s how this film journey started.”

Forum RIDM is the Montreal International Documentary Festival’s professional forum. Its Docs-In-Progress – Canadian Showcase is in partnership with Telefilm Canada and in collaboration with the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

This year’s other projects in the program are: Caiti Blues, directed by Justine Harbonnier and produced by Nellie Carrier; Meezan, directed and produced by Shahab Mihandoust; and Yintah, from co-directors Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickham, and Brenda Mitchell, and coproducers Wickham, Mitchell, Toledano, and Franklin López.

Directors and producers will be given the chance to present their films to an audience of buyers, distributors, festival programmers and international sales agents at the Cannes Film Market, which runs in-person format from Tuesday (May 17) to May 25.

Back Home is directed by Platzer (pictured right), a queer artist and filmmaker from Vancouver who graduated from the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba, and produced by Joella Cabalu, a Filipino Canadian documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver.

Their work kickstarted when the Vancouver International Film Festival, of which Platzer is an alum from its 2018 VIFF Catalyst mentorship program, submitted Back Home to Telefilm’s Talent to Watch nomination and selection process. A Telefilm jury of peers adjudicated the submitted projects and selected the finalists.

Five months later, Platzer and Cabalu received the program funding and began planning for the film, which had a budget of $249,347, as part of the Talent to Watch micro-budget requirements.

“Our timeline was that we would do the bulk of the filming in 2020, but we know how that was. So, our timeline was delayed by an extra year,” says Cabalu (pictured left), referring to the pandemic shutdowns.

“But we spent the better half of 2020 applying for funding for the rest of that financial gap. With that, we were able to close it with the BC Arts Council and the filmmaker assistance programs through the National Film Board and with the BC Yukon Studio.”

Since the film is fully financed and nearing completion in post-production, both Platzer and Cabalu hope the exposure to film festival programmers in Cannes will increase the chance Back Home will reach a wider audience on the film festival circuit.

“When we were doing our test screenings [through Forum RIDM], we noticed that it generated so much conversation,” says Cabalu. “A lot of the time, our test screeners are accompanied by their friends or partners, so they had somebody to have that dialogue with. And it just really struck us that we need to create space for that – and that space is the theatre experience at a festival.”

Images: Headshot of Nisha Platzer taken by Erika Lind; Headshot of Joella Cabalu taken by Josephine Anderson; feature image of Back Home-#185, 16mm Bolex, held by Nisha Platzer – photo by Jeremiah Reyes