A film festival tells you what it thinks of itself by what it opens with.
The Calgary International Film Festival announced its first wave this week, and opening night goes to A Long Winter, directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from a Colm Toibin short story. It was shot largely in Alberta.
Read that again, because the order matters. Not an Alberta film given the opening slot as a courtesy. An Andrew Haigh film, from a director whose last picture drew serious international attention, which happens to have been made here.
What is in the first wave
Alongside A Long Winter, the festival named The Incomer and Fatherland, the latter from Pawel Pawlikowski, both getting Canadian premieres. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, starring Rinko Kikuchi, gets an Alberta premiere.
And The Stunt Driver, directed by Michael Dowse, takes an Alberta premiere as well. Dowse is the Alberta name on this list that Albertans should recognize and mostly do not, which is its own small commentary on how this province treats the people who leave and keep working.
The festival runs September 24 to October 4.
Why the opening slot is worth noticing
Opening night is the one screening a festival cannot take back. It is the film the programmers put in front of the sponsors, the visiting press and the people who only come once a year and judge the whole enterprise by that evening.
For most of the past thirty years, the Alberta-shot film in a Canadian festival lineup went in the middle of the schedule, on a Tuesday, in the smaller room. It was there because someone thought it should be, not because it competed. The gap between those two positions is the whole story of a film industry growing up, and it is not usually announced. You just notice one year that the courtesy slot is gone and the Alberta film is on the marquee because it earned the marquee.
There is a straight line from that to what happened in the spring. The province opened its film tax credit to unscripted television in June and put its own numbers behind the sector, and a stage opened in Didsbury on Canada Day for productions working outside the cities. Infrastructure, incentive and now a marquee. Those three things arriving in the same year is not a coincidence, it is what a sector looks like when it stops being a hobby.
The landscape argument has always been the weak one
Every time Alberta talks about film, somebody mentions the mountains.
The mountains are lovely and they have never been the reason a production commits. British Columbia has mountains. New Zealand has mountains. What a producer actually buys is a crew that can be assembled in a week, a facility within an hour of the location, a tax credit that pays out when it says it will, and a province where a road closure does not take six weeks of correspondence.
A film shot largely in Alberta by a director of Haigh’s standing is evidence that those four things are now in place at a level that international financiers will accept. That is a far more useful signal than any number of pretty establishing shots, and it is the argument Alberta should be making in rooms outside this province.
What the festival is actually for
A festival is a market as much as a celebration, whatever the programme notes say. Distributors watch what gets a reaction. Producers watch which crews get thanked from the stage. Financiers watch whether a room fills.
Calgary has spent a long time building an audience for this, and audiences are not free. The city could easily have decided that a film festival was a nice thing other cities did, and let it wither through a couple of hard years in the energy cycle. It did not, and the payoff is that when a picture like this needed a launch, the room was already built.
Full lineup and tickets follow later this month. If you have never gone, this is the year the opening night film is one you can claim a piece of.
Does an Alberta shot film opening a Canadian festival change how you think about what gets made here, or is one marquee slot too thin a thing to read that much into?
