Houston laments “death of a dream”

MIRIAM HILL

The $8.5-million feature film The Snow Walker will be filmed in Churchill, Manitoba, despite five months spent trying to bring the project to Nunavut.

The film is based on two Farley Mowat books set in the western Hudson Bay coast area, and producers wanted to film the story in its authentic setting.

They approached the Nunavut government with a proposal to bring the shooting north. And the province of Manitoba put close to $1 million in incentives on the table to try and attract the production to Churchill.

Producer John Houston has worked since January on the project and said it was never expected that Nunavut could match Manitoba’s offer.

“It was more a direct request of a certain amount of money which seemed to fit the Nunavut situation,” he explained. “Nunavut clearly does not have as big a labour pool developed in film as Manitoba, so Manitoba could offer a higher incentive knowing it would provide work for more of its residents.”

Producers initially asked for a total of $625,000 to be broken down into a $500,000 location incentive and $125,000 toward Inuit training for a six-week shoot near Rankin Inlet.

The location incentive is based on what the crew would spend there, and was meant to help level the playing field between Nunavut and Manitoba.

The hamlet of Rankin Inlet offered $50,000 and waited for other organizations to follow suit. The Kivalliq office of the department of sustainable development said it could match that amount pending approval.

But no more money came and the project seemed to fizzle until Houston received a memo from the production company telling him to go to Churchill with the art director and other crew members to scout out the location.

“The penny kind of dropped there,” he said. Houston forwarded the memo to all the players in Nunavut. The hamlet responded immediately and invited Houston and another producer to a meeting with officials from the hamlet, NTI and Kivalliq Inuit Association.

An additional $150,000 was secured after that meeting, and DSD in Iqaluit offered another $50,000, for a total of $300,000 — but it still wasn’t enough.

The producers then submitted a counter offer — two weeks of filming for a commitment of $365,000. That would allow the major film sequences to be shot in Nunavut, with the film company committing to spending a minimum of $800,000 in the community.

Houston said they never received a response, and with the clock ticking they had to go with Churchill. Shooting is scheduled to start July 15.

Levinia Brown, Rankin Inlet’s deputy mayor, said the hamlet is very disappointed with the decision.

“We were focusing on the economic benefits since they would have been using local people with equipment like boats,” she said. The benefits would have also extended to local hotels, grocery stores and carvers.

“Now when the film is completed, audiences will see where it was filmed,” she said. “We will be disappointed to see Churchill up there.”

Houston said he doesn’t want to point fingers, but what it comes down to is the production companies are catching the government and Inuit organizations with no film policy in place.

“Here is an $8.5-million Canadian feature that was absolutely determined to film entirely in Nunavut if anybody would let them,” he said.

“We live in a world now where every jurisdiction in Canada has a policy and a budget and a commission to deal with film, TV and new media — with the exception of Nunavut.”

Ed McKenna, director of the community economic division at DSD, said he has been asked to submit a draft film policy to cabinet by the end of August, and politicians will decide whether to go with that policy or parts of it.

“Not having a policy has made it difficult to make a decision about any kind of support because you have to kind of make it up as you go along,” McKenna said.

This year, the GN has spent about $200,000 on film projects ranging from script development for Ann Hanson’s IMAX film to helping Igloolik Isuma Productions go to the Cannes Film Festival, he said.

Marie-Helene Cousineau, who has worked in Igloolik with Isuma Productions, was hired this week to act in a full-time advisory role, doing research and organizing consultations for the film policy. However, McKenna cautioned Nunavut is still a long way away from having a film commissioner.

Houston said in January there were scripts on his desk totalling $23 million from people wanting to film in Nunavut. Now that has fallen to $14.5 million with The Snow Walker going to Churchill.

“I’m hoping the post mortem on this, the death of a dream in a sense, is hopefully going to be the birth of something bigger,” he said. “Hopefully people will look at this and say, ‘Gee we don’t want this to happen again.’”