With access to public funding, an established production infrastructure and grassroots community support, Vancouver is growing into a thriving independent film hub Something is emerging in Vancouver’s independent film scene. For years, the city has primarily played the role of somewhere else — a cheaper Seattle, New York or generic American city. Its landscapes, tax incentives and favorable exchange rate drawing in Hollywood productions.
But increasingly, independent filmmakers are choosing to cast Vancouver as… well… Vancouver. One of them is Justin Ducharme, whose film “Seventeen” premiered at TIFF before landing in VIFF’s Northern Lights program. It captures the lives of three Indigenous sex workers in the Downtown Eastside.
It’s produced by Experimental Forest Films, which Tyler Hagan had co-founded with filmmaker Kathleen Hepburn. Hagan calls the film “a bit of a love slash hate letter to Vancouver.” “From day one, [Ducharme] always said, you know, this film is like a love letter to chosen family and to the kinships that are born out of displacement, need,” Hagan explains. For a long time, that was the exception.
Out of film school, Hagan and Hepburn weren’t seeing films they were interested in being made. Starting with a short that played TIFF, then the feature “Never Steady, Never Still,” followed by “When the World Broke Open,” and others. Many of the company’s Indigenous themes are no accident.
Hagan is Métis and says he “kind of came up in filmmaking with the Indigenous film community in Canada.” He says that there’s a lot of Indigenous talent that lives and works out of British Columbia. There’s a lot of opportunity for storytelling and talented folks out here.” A decade later, eight of the company’s 10 films have been first features, most of which were directed by B.C.-based filmmakers and are set in the province. Despite now living in Toronto, she returned to shoot her deeply personal film, “Blue Heron” — a Canada-Hungary co-production — in the place she grew up in.
It went on to premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and win TIFF’s Best Canadian Discovery Award. She returns to VIFF this year as a guest curator of Leading Lights. Romvari says that she “had never seen Vancouver Island in a film before, certainly not as itself, as Vancouver Island, and I thought that was such a shame because it’s such a beautiful and stunning landscape.” Access to public funding for the arts, she says, helped her create the version of the film that she wanted to.
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