Critics and programmers around the world agreed: Sleeping Giant premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week competition before playing at the Toronto International Film Festival and earning four Canadian Screen Award nominations. An unsentimental evocation of the awkwardness of adolescence, Sleeping Giant follows three kids during a tense summer vacation on the shores of Lake Superior as they struggle with their friendships, families and budding romantic feelings.

“When you’re working with a larger budget, with a larger crew, you’re free to increase the scope of your project in some ways, but you’re much more limited in terms of steering the ship,” says Cividino. “You can’t just decide, ‘I want to do this shot,’ or spend three days workshopping a scene. Everything costs a lot more money on a larger scale, and that means you essentially have to go in with a plan and execute it.

“Whereas, a lower budget level, although it has many of its own constraints, allows you the freedom of employing a process that encourages exploration. I think there’s a lot of freedom that comes with the DIY atmosphere that you’re finding in the Toronto scene,” says Cividino.

CINEMA CAN BE A source of entertainment, but it can also be a tool for activism. The democratization of filmmaking has made it possible to tell stories that were once hidden from view.

Susan Enberg, (master’s) Documentary Media ’17, was researching Canada’s residential school system when she learned about St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont., where some of the system’s worst atrocities took place. She learned of the sexual, physical and psychological assaults; of the homemade electric chair that was used for punishment; and of how little the survivors had been compensated. Their stories are the foundation of In Jesus’ Name: Shattering the Silence of St. Anne’s Residential School, the first in a series of documentary films – Erasing Cultural Genocide – about St. Anne’s and its survivors.

“Without the courage of the survivors, and their willingness to speak out about what they endured at the school, people in Canada would still not truly know the depth, breadth and severity of the abuses that occurred at the schools,” says Enberg. “Many people had become more aware of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and what its admissions were.

When our film came out, people really paid attention. People want to know.”

Enberg came to filmmaking via a different route than the aforementioned directors. A mature student and single mother, Enberg devoted most of her career to human rights issues, and saw documentary filmmaking as a chance to bring her activism to an audience beyond academia. As a survivor of abuse, and someone whose Métis heritage was largely hidden from her growing up, her documentary has personal significance.

Despite the importance of her project, its status as a student film made it ineligible for public arts council grants. “A lot of documentary filmmakers make promises to pay people in the future when they start making money, and I don’t agree with that,” says Enberg. “When somebody’s doing a task for me, I pay them, so I made sure I paid my crew all the way through—while I was a student. It came out of my OSAP, it came out of my child support, it came out of my daily meal allowance for my family.”

For In Jesus’ Name, Enberg didn’t have the luxury of a low budget. “I had to go into a fly-in community with a crew, and we were there for three-and-a-half or four weeks altogether. I had to house everybody, feed everybody—the only people that jumped to our assistance was the Office of the President of Ryerson.” Within 12 hours of writing then-president Sheldon Levy, Enberg received $10,000 for travel to Fort Albany.

In Jesus’ Name won many awards on the festival circuit, was picked up by CBC Documentary channel for a three-year contract, and has been installed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Screenings at festivals and institutions have featured Q&As with Enberg alongside St. Anne’s survivors Leo Loone and Edmund MeAatawabin. Enberg is currently at work on two new films: Fight Like a Woman (a short documentary about female Muay Thai fighters) and 8 ½ Seconds (about the police-shooting death of Michael MacIsaac in Ajax).

IN THE 1980S, RYERSON was a breeding ground for the first cohort of “Toronto New Wave” filmmakers. The bonds formed by film students like Bruce McDonald (’82), Jeremy Podeswa (’84) and Adrienne Mitchell (’84) could be felt as they moved through the industry.

The waves are cyclical, and today’s second wave are actively fostering incoming generations. After graduating from Ryerson, Rebeccah Love pursued a master’s degree in screenwriting at the University of Guelph, where students were matched with mentors to work alongside in the summer. Her mentor was Kazik Radwanski. “He had emerged as this giant of independent filmmaking in this city,” she says. “I thought: How great would it be to be matched up with him and learn filmmaking from him? We started meeting up once a week for coffee, and in these sessions, he gave me feedback on a number of scripts, including the script for Acres.”

With their first string of films completed, this group of the Toronto New Wave are now looking ahead at future projects. Aidan Shipley recalls the 2017 TIFF premiere of Cardinals as being a watershed moment. “It was totally overwhelming. I feel like I blacked out for a couple of days—and the alcohol wasn’t fully responsible for that, either,” he says. “But from the people I was able to meet through that, I feel I can go develop any project now through one connection or another I made at TIFF.” He is now producing a documentary on childhood sexual assault called A Girl Named C.

Since the success of Sleeping Giant, Andrew Cividino has made a living as a director through TV and commercial work, and at the time of this interview, he was casting his second feature (which had just secured financing), writing his third, and developing a sci-fi drama series for television. “I’ve learned that it’s important to have many irons in the fire, because the timing is often out of your control,” he says. “It’s a miracle that anything gets made, and even more so that anything good gets made.”

Are things easier now? “I would love to say it has gotten a lot easier, but it has just gotten different,” says Cividino. “The opportunities that I’ve been presented with have been great, and increased, but you’re just faced with new challenges. I think filmmaking is an inherently challenging process, and maybe the moment you stop being challenged is the moment you stop making interesting work, anyway.”

Meanwhile, at the School of Image Arts, the next generation is always underway—and Ryerson offers a range of scholarships to foster it. “We’re not an ivory tower in Image Arts,” says Alex Anderson. “We aren’t a separate place from the real world. We’re really doing what we can to support the Canadian film industry. It’s a huge leap to become a professional, but I see us as a cauldron. Talent, ideas… that’s our job.”

Winter 2019 / Ryerson University Magazine 19