Playback is proud to present the 2024 cohort for our annual 10 to Watch. This year’s group of Canadian screen industry talents were selected from more than 250 submissions. We are rolling out profiles on each individual in the coming weeks.
A fateful layoff was the catalyst director Gillian McKercher needed to pursue a full-time career in the screen industry.
The Calgary-born filmmaker tells Playback Daily she fell in love with filmmaking at age 17, while she attended a two-week summer camp with the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF). While she was still drawn to film, she instead chose to earn her bachelor’s of chemical engineering at the University of Calgary.
She had a foot in both worlds for a few years, making the two-season web series The Calgary Collection in 2013 and 2014, while working in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Then a 2016 layoff pushed her to pursue her passion full-time.
“Until recently, I felt like I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder by being from Alberta, for one thing, not having gone to a school like Ryerson or Concordia, and chosen to be an artist right from the beginning,” says McKercher. “I really wanted to create something of my own.”
She co-founded the production company Kino Sum Productions in 2017 with Nicola Waugh and Guillaume Carlier, who she met at CSIF. At the time, Waugh was CSIF’s programming and communications director while Carlier was an independent filmmaker and videographer.
There was no slowing down from there. She wrote and directed her first feature, Circle of Steel, which won the Audience Award at CIFF in 2018 before going to other North American festivals as well as a theatrical run.
Her latest feature, Lucky Star, closed out this year’s CIFF as well last Saturday (Sept. 28). McKercher began writing the feature in 2019, inspired by stories of cheating – more specifically, cheating fathers. In between she wrote, directed and starred in the CBC Gem documentary Orphaned in 2021.
Later that year she went to the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) as a director resident, where she finished Lucky Star‘s first draft. She first received assistance from the Harold Greenberg Fund. From there, the ball started rolling and she also picked up CFC-Netflix Project Development Accelerator funding, through which she got in touch with the actor Terry Chen, who stars in the film. In 2021, production financing from Teleflim Canada came through and, with all the dominos in place, they shot the film in winter 2023. It will be released theatrically by Game Theory Films.
It was at the CFC where she met John Paizs, who had been a director-mentor there for 20 years. Paizs says McKercher stood out to him immediately for her work ethic. He estimates that “maybe a quarter” of the directors that go through the program actually go on to make a feature. By the time she had applied to the CFC, she had already made documentaries, music videos and a web series, as well as her first feature.
“I honestly believe that, given the growth that I’ve seen in her work over the last few years, if she stays the course, I think she has every potential to establish herself in the first rank of Canadian directors down the road,” he says, praising her dedication to telling the stories of “real people,” as opposed to chasing pop culture trends.
Looking ahead, McKercher says she wants to make the leap to the small screen.
“Last year, I was a shadow director on Heartland, and that was a really amazing experience. I got to shadow under Dean Bennett, and he’s a master of the craft. It was so amazing to see him do his job,” she says. “So I really want to do what he does eventually, and I think I have the skills to do that.”
After Lucky Star, she has a slew of projects in various stages of development. She recently finished the mix on A Dickens of a Christmas, a TV movie she shot four months prior, produced by Messina Captor Films and Polyscope Productions. Then there’s Masquerade, an office romance mini-series she’s in post-production on for ByteDance – however, she noted the title will be changed.
McKercher has completed the first draft of Scar Tissue, her next outing as writer and director. That project received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund’s Script Development Grant. Now, she’s just trying to figure out its scale.
At the same time, she’s producing and working with a writer on the first draft of Lube City, a short film funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Calgary Arts Development.
“Scar Tissue is a feature film, and I’d love to make it bigger than just a $1 million budget,” she says. “I think it’s a more commercial project than anything else I’ve worked on in the past.”
McKercher says she’s always had a natural love of film and pop culture – she watched the Oscars every year growing up, and never missed a Thursday review from Roger Ebert or the entertainment section of the Calgary Herald.
“Then when I did that [CSIF] camp,” she says, “it was the first time I had been supported and nurtured to make a film with a screenplay, and people saying, ‘You have a good idea.’ It was so valuable.”
Despite her unconventional entry point into the industry, McKercher says she has felt welcomed and now she wants to see her far she can take herself and Kino Sum. That still means doing the small independent projects close to her heart, but it can also mean pursuing bigger projects. Waugh left Kino Sum last year, but McKercher says the trio still work together, and credits their influence as the reason she’s making films today.
Being a mother of two now also changes how she approaches creative work – meaning not everything can be “passion projects 24/7.” That doesn’t require pessimism, however. She recently met with several Canadian women filmmakers who are also working mothers and left inspired.
“I know that other women have done it,” she says. “So I can do it [too] and just keep paying it forward for other new people who are coming up.”
Image courtesy of Gillian McKercher