Toronto immigrants’ tale gains acclaim
by Susan Walker, Toronto Star

The Toronto Star
June 17, 2005 Friday

Nothing says you can’t move an audience with a dramatic story –
and raise some social issues while you’re doing it – in 17 minutes.

Hogtown Blues, a short film made as a graduating project by York
University film students Hugh Gibson and Carl Elster, has made its way
into 10 film festivals, from Whistler to Bilbao, since it premiered
last year at the Toronto film festival.

A strong entry in the Canadian competition at the Worldwide Short Film
Festival, Hogtown Blues screens tonight at 9: 30 at Innis College. Akin
to the story of the ugly side of immigrant life revealed in Stephen
Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, the script originated with Gibson’s
admiration for a 1949 French film, Le Sang des betes, about conditions
in a slaughterhouse.

One bit of research led to another. Gibson found out that Toronto was
dubbed Hogtown because of the many stockyards where immigrants found
work. Developments in Russia, where Chechnyian rebels had just taken
hostages in a Moscow theatre, made him think of the lives of Russian
immigrants in Toronto and the baggage they might bring with them.

His male character is a hard-drinking Russian brute who steals from
his mates in a meatpacking plant and calls his daughter a “whore”
for consorting with a Muslim man.

“I’m interested in the juncture where documentary and fiction meet,”
says Gibson, who got searing performances out of actors Vladimir
Radian and Araxi Arslanian. Arslanian is the daughter Katsia, a
nurse in her native country. She cleans toilets and is caring for
her severely ill son Ivan, played by 11-year-old Mitch Daniels.

“I was interested in what was going on in Russia and Chechnya, and
how this family had been affected by that war,” he says. “There’s a
lot of different subject matter packed into the movie.”

The filmmakers got a lucky break when casting director Jenny Lewis,
a York University alumna, agreed to send their script around.
Arslanian, who was developing her own one-woman play and would later
earn a Dora nomination for her performance in it, has an Armenian
background. Radian is Romanian-born. Both were taken by the script,
says Elster, who was both producer and cinematographer on the short.
“Araxi had to learn to speak Russian phonetically for the film.”

Shooting in donated space in an apartment building near Broadview
and Danforth Aves., Elster adopted the hand-held style of Lars von
Trier’s cinematographer on Breaking the Waves.

The students raised financing and favours to the tune of $10,000
to make the film, but marketing and appearances at festivals added
$5,000 to their budget.

Since opening at the Toronto festival, Hogtown Blues has screened
at the Montreal World Film Festival, the Palm Springs International
Festival of Short Films, and at fests in Edmonton, Austin, Whistler,
Sudbury and San Jose, Calif. Last month it won an audience award in
Bilbao and, this month, the short screens in the Netherlands.

All this exposure has made some valuable contacts for the filmmakers.
They are now negotiating with a distributor who wants to sell their
film overseas, where broadcasters are friendlier to the idea of airing
short films.

GRAPHIC: Vladimir Radian is searing as Alexi in Hogtown Blues.