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Alumni say the biggest advantage of school was connecting with like-minded peers. Examine the crews of their debut films and you’ll find almost entirely Ryerson alumni—from cinematographers to editors to producers to performers.
“When you’re working in film, it’s such a collaborative space—it’s so important to trust and believe in the people you work with,” says Cividino. “Film school is a really wonderful place to find that. You work with people who you don’t necessarily connect with, but when you find the people you do, you sort-of hold on to each other for dear life. When you’re in the thick of filmmaking, those are the people you can trust to tell your stories.”
“Every assignment you make, you put on a screen in front of your peers, and everybody critiques it,” remembers writer/director Jasmin Mozaffari. “You have to get used to that. But then you end up self-critiquing, and you always end up setting the bar higher.”
Beyond finding a network, school is a place to find your voice. Mozaffari was enrolled in another university’s film studies program when she realized that her passion was to make films. When she transferred to Ryerson, she had never made a film before, and the four-year program was a process of discovery.
“We were doing small documentaries, shorts. I was editing, I was trying out different things. I always knew I wanted to be a director. I was trying to find out what is my voice.” In her fourth year, she directed a short that would become the basis for her acclaimed 2018 feature Firecrackers.
AT SOME POINT, ALL student filmmakers will have to reckon with the reality of filmmaking outside of school. Radwanski and Montgomery came upon their style early when they travelled to Kenya between third and fourth year to make Nakuro Song, a documentary about a soccer team. “It really informed the way we were working at the time, and in many ways how we’re still working today,” says Montgomery. “There were only three of us there, and we only had as much gear as we could carry, and we just relied a lot on a certain documentary aesthetic to keep things nimble and light. We enjoy working with a very small crew.”
“I always knew I wanted to be a director. I was trying to find out what is my voice.”
Jasmin Mozaffari
The large-scale productions that Rebeccah Love mounted for her student films were no longer possible after graduation—but starting over led her down a new path. “I didn’t have access to the resource of the soundstage anymore, and I didn’t have budgets to hire 60 to 80 people. That’s where my style changed. I made a film called Drawing Duncan Palmer working with a Ryerson cinematographer, Eric Rowe. We didn’t have money to make a big, over-the-top production, so we made a film that was very minimalist, with no production design budget, using natural lighting.”
Cividino’s first feature benefited from its modest budget. “I think that although Sleeping Giant would have been easier to make with a substantial budget, it would have been a worse film. It was the freedom to make it the way we wanted to that gave it the heartbeat it has.”
18 Ryerson University Magazine / Winter 2019
