While doing a report on women who work in Montreal’s technology sector. Global news took the time to ask our very own Rosie about some of the challenges she and Goldrush face when looking to hire. Check out the segment below, Rosie’s interview starts at the 1:23 mark.
The filmmaking industry in Canada can seem a daunting beast, with securing the financing necessary to get a project off the ground the first snaggle-toothed impediment. Indeed, the abundance of hurdles on this front is part of the reason Canadian filmmaker Paul Donovan once compared making a movie in Canada to climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.
Regardless, there’s no shortage of money-backed enthusiasm for getting Canadian films into the rarified air where successful productions lurk.
From film collectives and local-area arts councils through government-mandated broadcaster purses, private equity financing, tax incentives, debt financing, international co-production partners, film distributors and straight-up government funding and incentives, there’s a vast range of sources available for bankrolling Canadian productions.
Here are some of them:
Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund
Cogeco Program Development Fund
Film and Creative Industries Nova Scotia
Independent Production Fund
Le Fonds Harold Greenberg
Quebecor Fund
Rogers Documentary Fund
Saskatchewan Film and Video Development Corporation (SaskFilm)
Shaw Rocket Fund (formerly Shaw Television Broadcast Fund)
Small Market Local Programming Fund
The TELUS Fund
Telefilm Canada
It’s important to note that equity financing is almost always part of the equation for independent film financing. In other words, all the funds included in the above list typically just constitute one piece of financing, and have to be backed by private-equity investments and/or pre-sales.
Here at Goldrush — where we pursue a financing strategy for the live-action and animated feature-length motion pictures we finance and produce that facilitates meeting or exceeding targeted financial performance criteria — we know all too well that establishing financing for a film is an important first step in seeing the final product through.
Once the dollars are secured, the creative engines can go at full blast and the ascent up the mountain eases meaningfully. Have a look at some of our mountain-toppers here.
LATimes.com have published an interesting article with films and performances they think were overlooked in this years Academy Award nominations. Maria’s moving turn in Beautiful Boy was included:
Many small-budget features and their actors were overlooked by the Oscars. That includes ‘The Music Never Stopped,’ Maria Bello, Ashley Rickards and Anson Mount.
In a perfect world, every theatrically released movie would have the exact same chance to compete each year for the Academy Award in its worthiest categories. But just like with the lottery, you have to play to win, and when it comes to the Oscars, many smaller, independently made films just can’t afford to play.
Fortunately, as a Times film reviewer, Netflix devotee and overall movie junkie, I see a number of strong features each year that fly so far under Hollywood’s radar as to barely exist. But they do exist, often as memorably — if not more so — than the many higher profile, more pedigreed selections that fill the lists of Oscar hopefuls.
So, with this year’s Academy Award nominations just announced, it seemed like an appropriate time to recall some of 2011′s best “unconsidered” films and, in that aforementioned perfect world, where they might have landed in the race for Oscar gold.
On the lead actress front, another highly respected performer, Maria Bello, was robbed of consideration for her stunning portrayal of a mother devastated by her teenage son’s murder-suicide shooting rampage in the difficult, under-seen “Beautiful Boy.” Bello’s brave interpretation of Shawn Ku and Michael Armbruster’s sensitive script (Ku also directed) was, in many ways, superior to Screen Actors Guild Award nominee Tilda Swinton’s widely noted but arguably less accessible performance in the similarly themed “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
Had “Beautiful Boy” been sufficiently exposed to academy members and other voting blocs by its distributor, Anchor Bay, Bello may have very well found herself among the many fine lead actress contenders. But, according to the film’s producer, Lee Clay, it was “less an Anchor Bay-specific thing and more a small, independent movie-specific thing.” He explained, “To really mount a serious Oscar campaign, you’re talking about a spend of between half a million and a million dollars, which was more than the film’s entire [prints and advertising] budget to begin with.”
– LATimes.com
Beautiful Boy
Maria Bello, Michael Sheen
Directed by Shawn Ku
Rolling Stone: star rating
Community: star rating
By PETER TRAVERS
JUNE 2, 2011
It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. There’s a shooting at your son’s college. You’re frantic that he is wounded or worse. Instead, the cops arrive at your door and announce that your beautiful boy is not the victim but the shooter, responsible for the deaths of 21 students.
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Out of that premise, horrifically familiar from tragedies at Columbine and Virginia Tech, director Shawn Ku has crafted a film that will haunt you for a good long time. As Kate and Bill, the parents of the remote boy they just phoned the night before to plan a family vacation, Maria Bello and Michael Sheen give performances that rip at your insides. Ku and co-writer Michael Armbruster aren’t trying to make a documentary or build a psychological case study on what makes a child kill. We briefly see the son, Sammy (an indelibly lost Kyle Gallner), feeling ignored in his freshman writing class and later phoning home where his parents can’t really intuit his cry for help. Later, we see videos Sammy left behind, raging at a world he claims has “ravaged his heart.” Ku doesn’t try to explain Sammy. Instead, he puts us inside the heads of Kate and Bill who must cope with the unthinkable. Are they to blame for their son’s actions? And, if not, where can they put their rage? Isolated by the media crush at their door, this couple — already on the verge of divorce — realize they have no one but each other. Will it be peace or war?
The Complete Archive: Over 20 Years of Peter Travers’ Movie Reviews Now Online
Nothing about Beautiful Boy would have hit this hard without two great actors to shoulder its pain. That it gets. Sheen is superb, revealing a defeated man who has always preferred to deal with emotions by shutting them down. But his son’s tragedy is a punch he can’t roll with. As Kate, Bello never makes a false move. An intuitive actress of unerring instincts (see her in A History of Violence), Bello has the range to make every nuance felt. Her scenes with Sheen in a shabby motel, where Kate and Bill have gone to hide, exude a shattering intimacy. Bello’s blazing performance will burn in your memory. Same goes for the film.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/beautiful-boy-20110602
