Best Screenplay Nominees
Paul Apak Angilirq – Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

Paul Apak Angilirq may be a sentimental favorite at the Genies this year. The screenwriter/producer/editor succumbed to cancer at age 44 in 1998, before Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) was completed.

Adapted from legends told to him by Inuit elders, Angilirq’s screenplay was the first ever written in the Inuktitut language. Atanarjuat coproducer Norman Cohn remembers his colleague and friend as a trailblazer for Aboriginal filmmakers.

‘He should go down in history as one of Canada’s most extraordinary filmmakers, certainly the most extraordinary unknown filmmaker,’ says Cohn. ‘He was one of the first, and the most successful, of any of the Aboriginal filmmakers brought into these skills in the 1980s.’

Angilirq, who also coproduced Atanarjuat, first got involved in production as part of the government’s Inukshuk Project, an initiative to train members of the Aboriginal community in TV production. He became one of the first producers at the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in 1981, and nine years later cofounded Igloolik Isuma Productions.

Cohn says Angilirq was a highly innovative filmmaker, melding his traditional cultural skills with modern film techniques in a way perhaps no one else could.

‘For example, in 1987 he led a dog-team expedition 3,000 kilometers from Igloolik to northern Greenland and filmed it,’ Cohn recalls. ‘He made five half-hour programs for IBC at the same time.’

Cohn says the Inuit believe that in death, one’s spirit continues on and is reincarnated, and is certain Angilirq is enjoying his film’s success from elsewhere.

‘After Apak died, the next 20 or 30 babies born in Igloolik were all named Apak, so there are a number of candidates who will grow up and get to see this movie,’ says Cohn. ‘I would think that the spirit in his body would be very satisfied and proud of what he and all of us have done.’ Dustin Dinoff

Renny Bartlett – Eisenstein

1946 – having just completed part two of his Ivan the Terrible trilogy, Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein attends a ball where he is to receive the Stalin Prize for his work on the first part of the series. At the same time, across the Kremlin, Stalin is viewing the final cut of part two.

According to the story, related to filmmaker Renny Bartlett by Eisenstein Museum curator Naum Kleiman, as Stalin watches the second installment, he realizes the film, a portrait of an insane tyrant, is a thinly veiled rebuke of himself, rather than the song of praise he expected.

‘Stalin realizes immediately he’s been had,’ Bartlett recounts. ‘As he gets more and more angry, Eisenstein is in another part of the Kremlin dancing faster and faster in his own private victory celebration of finally standing up to Stalin.’

Eisenstein’s dance becomes so intense that he suffers a heart attack that leads to his death two years later. Still, his artistic freedom having long been reined in by Stalin’s dictatorial control, the filmmaker is redeemed, having exacted revenge through the medium with which he had become synonymous.

It was with this insight that Bartlett began a decade-long investigation of the filmmaker that ultimately evolved into the feature Eisenstein, for which he has been nominated for a best screenplay Genie.

‘This [incident] is out of a Hollywood film,’ he says. ‘You see it all immediately. So I decided that I’ve got the end of a film, now I’ve got to find out the rest.’

He proceeded on a meticulous search for details of Eisenstein’s life that led him from Mexico to Kazakhstan. The screenplay is an amalgamation of the obscure gems Bartlett dug up and apocryphal stories passed along for generations from those who knew Eisenstein from the 1920s to 1940s.

Bartlett sees the mixing of truth and fiction in this way as appropriate when telling the story of a man who made the blurring of such lines his life’s work.

‘He was a master propagandist,’ Bartlett says. ‘His whole life was about cutting between true life and fiction. The core of the film plays between the two.’ Peter Vamos

Catherine Martin – Mariages

Mariages is a turn-of-the-century drama of complex female relationships, including the story of 20-year-old Yvonne, a sensual, passionate spirit better suited to love than the convent. Marie-Eve Bertrand plays Yvonne and Guylaine Tremblay is cast as the oppressive and wounded older sister.

Nominated for best original screenplay, Mariages writer/director Catherine Martin sees herself primarily as a filmmaker or cineaste.

‘I write a film so as to have as much of the visual and sound dimension as possible,’ she says. ‘As I was writing I was already thinking about directing.’

Martin spent months doing research to develop a sensibility, more than a formal analysis, of the life of Quebec women in that period. Primary reference materials included a massive history of Quebec covering the past 400 years, historian Jean Provencher’s Les Quatre Saisons, and a sociological study which included extracts of women’s personal diaries called Les Femmes autour du siecle, 1880-1940.

‘I also did a lot of iconographic research, mostly period photos [and paintings], which is very important to me because I work with imagery,’ she says.

Martin had to make deliberate and precise choices throughout the writing and production. ‘It was a very limited budget [$1.7 million], but if I’d had more money I would have made the same film. I didn’t see it as a constraint. I saw it more as an interesting challenge and I wanted to go towards the essential.’ She had in mind a sober and austere aesthetic that she associates with certain films by Bergman and Bresson.

Even though Mariages, produced by Les Productions 23 and distributed by Film Tonic, is a period piece, Martin says she was more preoccupied with Yvonne’s interior life than the art direction or photography.

Martin hopes Yvonne’s personal search for identity through love and sexuality strikes a contemporary chord. ‘We can have great faith in love, which is something I think is not unique to any era,’ she says. ‘I chose to place it in another period because that allowed me to liberate my imagination.’ Leo Rice-Barker

Judith Thompson – Lost and Delirious

When Judith Thompson was approached eight years ago to adapt novelist Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath, her original draft bore little resemblance to the source work.

The script for Lost and Delirious may have captured the elemental qualities of Swan’s work about murder and young women coming of age in a private girls school, says Thompson, but it was different enough to get her fired. So it was a shock that after changes of producers and directors, the feature’s labyrinthine development process brought the script back to her. Both Swan and director Lea Pool (Emporte-moi) supported Thompson’s alternative vision for the story, she says, which was decidedly more explicit in its depiction of lesbian attraction.

‘The film still features a dark and aggressive character,’ says Thompson of the transformation of the novel to screenplay. ‘It is still about secret pacts and passion and love, which is a high-risk and dangerous emotion. Why not bring that to film?’

Thompson, a writing professor at Guelph University, feels ‘very lucky’ that Pool and the film’s producers, Lorraine Richard and Louis-Philippe Rochon of Cite-Amerique and Greg Dummett of Dummett Films, backed the looser adaptation and took it to the screen with few compromises.

‘It’s a really beautiful film,’ she says of the final product. Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly), Jessica Pare (Stardom), Mischa Barton (The Sixth Sense), Jackie Burroughs (Road to Avonlea) and Graham Greene (The Green Mile) are the film’s stars.

Rhombus Media, meanwhile, is in post with Perfect Pie, from a screenplay Thompson adapted from her own play. Pie tells the story of two middle-aged women who reunite at an Ontario farm where they suffered a life-changing trauma 30 years earlier. Barbara Willis Sweete (Leporello) directs. Ian Edwards

Andre Turpin – Un crabe dans la tete

Montreal-based Andre Turpin has already made his mark as a top-notch director of photography, having lensed the films of Denis Villeneuve, including Maelstrom, which won him a Genie and a Jutra. But he is also a writer and director in his own right, having worn all three hats on 1995’s Zigrail and ‘Jules et Fanny,’ a segment in the following year’s Cosmos. Un crabe dans la tete represents his return to one-man-band status.

The script for Crabe follows the chameleon-like Alex, an underwater photographer inadvertently stranded in his hometown of Montreal. He renews old relationships and forges new ones, but they all eventually

suffer from his seeming need to always accommodate everybody. Turpin says Alex hits close to home.

‘It’s really autobiographical in the sense of the character’s problems,’ he explains. ‘The main themes in the film are things I’ve lived and I think some of my friends have lived. Those themes are the fear of being judged by others, the fear of confrontation and the desire to please everyone you meet.’

Turpin approached producers Joseph Hillel and Luc Dery of Production Qu4tre par Quatre in December 1997 with a two-page synopsis. He says the themes at that early stage resemble those in the finished film, but the original storyline was too on-the-nose. He credits the producers with helping steer him in the right direction.

‘I would have them read at each important step of the process, whether that was a 22-page synopsis or the big corkboard where I had my scene-by-scene description,’ Turpin explains. ‘They would discuss all the technical aspects of scriptwriting. They were really active in the creative aspects of the scriptwriting.’

The producers also hired screenwriters Benoit Guichard (La bouteille) and Marcel Beaulieu (Une jeune fille a la fenetre) as story editors, the latter cowriting with Turpin for a couple of weeks.

Turpin intends to continue shooting other directors’ films, and is also in talks about codirecting a couple of projects. He will begin a new script in January and is mulling over various ideas, including a world without sound, astrophysics, consumerism and the relationship between media and corporations. Mark Dillon