Sofia Bohdanowicz’s latest project is a feature-length documentary called Steve’s Version.Photograph by Maria Luisa Meoni; styling by Lorenza Bas/Supplied
At the recently wrapped Cannes Film Festival, only two Canadian productions played in the official lineup: Romain F. Dubois’s short Skinny Bottines (Skinny Boots), which screened in the Critics’ Week sidebar, and Jorge Thielen Armand’s Venezuelan-set thriller Death Has No Master, which ran in the Directors’ Fortnight slate.
But that didn’t preclude an armada of Canadian filmmakers from invading the shores of the French Riviera – they were just on the hunt for money and partners, instead of reviews and festival prizes.
Just as important as the official Cannes festival – perhaps even more so, in the grand scheme of things – is the business-oriented Marché du Film, which runs parallel to the red-carpet glitz and glamour.
The market, which stretches from a warren of pavilions inside the basement of the Grand Palais festival hub to hotel suites and cafés and anywhere a meeting can be held across the city, is where filmmakers from around the world gather to cobble together partnerships with financiers, sales agents, festival programmers and distributors.
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And, for a contingent of Canadian filmmakers, it is where the final pieces of a years-in-the-making puzzle can finally be placed together.
Take the case of Sofia Bohdanowicz, who arrived in Cannes with about the highest pedigree that a Canadian filmmaker can hope for.
A director who has made both acclaimed documentaries (Maison du bonheur, Never Eat Alone) and narrative fiction (MS Slavic 7, last year’s Measures for a Funeral, which was just up for two Canadian Screen Awards), Bohdanowicz possesses the kind of singular artistic voice that Canada should be working hard to export around the world.
Her work, frequently created in collaboration with actress Deragh Campbell, is emotionally and intellectually ferocious, the vision of an intensely curious and passionate artist.
Bohdanowicz doesn’t need all that much money to do it, either. Her latest project, the feature-length documentary Steve’s Version, was shot with a Canada Council for the Arts grant of just $60,000.
Still, Bohdanowicz needs to cross the postproduction finish line with gap financing, which is what brought her to Cannes, part of the “Canada Showcase” pitch session organized by Telefilm in partnership with the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM).
A few weeks before Cannes began, the pressure was on.
“When you have a rough cut of a film, there’s always that push and pull of wanting to get people interested, but how soon is it to be showing your cards? Once you start putting it out there to programmers, sales agents, distributors, you only get that one chance,” Bohdanowicz said from Madrid, where she was participating in a residency at the Academia de Cine. “It’s always risky to reveal a film at this stage. But that’s the adventure.”
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Steve’s Version, which Bohdanowicz had been roughly developing for five years after a conversation with her uncle about her family history, is a diary-like doc following the director, recovering from a breakup, as she travels across Europe, where she gradually pieces together the history of her violinist grandfather.
“As I started travelling, the film started to feel a little like a game. I started to pick up traces and clues of him and began to write journal entries about it. In many ways, it resembles Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, in which he gets assigned to make a movie about the general and ends up talking about how he got dumped instead,” Bohdanowicz said with a laugh.
“It’s about how do you make a portrait of someone when you can’t access them, and when they don’t exist anymore? How do you talk about the essence of a person without actually revealing them?”
To get partners on board, Bohdanowicz had to play the role of a performer herself – preparing and memorizing a three-and-a-half-minute pitch speech about her project, which she’d deliver to a room of a few dozen industry players in Cannes, alongside about 10 minutes of footage from her film. Bohdanowicz was one of four documentarians in the RIDM showcase, and the only one not based in Quebec.
“It was emotional, because we’ve all been working together and supporting one another over the course of a month, and for me, this film is very personal, and it’s the first time in my career that I’m talking about my life, playing myself,” Bohdanowicz recounted on the ground in Cannes, just a few hours after the showcase wrapped.
“It’s about getting over the fear of being vulnerable and transparent about that experience, while also trying to get people to support it. Pitching is a necessary evil, but this is the first time I’ve done so in such a big way on such a large platform. There are very intense, existential questions I’m asking with this film. But I feel I was authentic and genuine.”
It helped, too, that Bohdanowicz was accompanied by Olivier Alary, the film’s composer and associate producer, who had previously worked with the director on Measures for a Funeral.
“The first couple of days, we were just walking around Cannes, practising the speech on the Croisette,” Bohdanowicz said, referring to the city’s famed waterfront promenade. “Yesterday at dinner, when RIDM took all the filmmakers out, the food took a long time to arrive, so Olivier and I just went back of the restaurant and kept practising over and over again.”
Just as important as the pitch, the results of which would trickle in over the next few months, were the many meetings that would happen outside the room – “the human connections, the human-touch element” – with Bohdanowicz in Cannes for the duration of the festival. And, of course, she would make time to catch a few movies, too.
“I’m a cinephile so it’s part of my practice to watch and discover,” Bohdanowicz said, circling the new titles from Radu Jude, Dominga Sotomayor, and her friend and fellow Canadian Jorge Thielen Armand.
“I’m of course hoping to get the completion funding, and it would be wonderful to finish the film properly. But if I don’t, I know the way out,” she added.
“I know the way out of the maze pretty well. It takes a little more elbow grease to scrub the bathtub, to mix the metaphors. Every filmmaker has their own way.”