Beyond ‘Hollywood North’: How Vancouver’s Indie Film Scene Is Building Its Own Ecosystem

Something is emerging in Vancouver’s independent film scene. For years, the city has primarily played the role of somewhere else — a cheaper Seattle, New York or generic American city. Its landscapes, tax incentives and favorable exchange rate drawing in Hollywood productions. But increasingly, independent filmmakers are choosing to cast Vancouver as… well… Vancouver.

One of them is Justin Ducharme, whose film “Seventeen” premiered at TIFF before landing in VIFF’s Northern Lights program. It captures the lives of three Indigenous sex workers in the Downtown Eastside.

It’s produced by Experimental Forest Films, which Tyler Hagan had co-founded with filmmaker Kathleen Hepburn. Hagan calls the film “a bit of a love slash hate letter to Vancouver.”

“From day one, [Ducharme] always said, you know, this film is like a love letter to chosen family and to the kinships that are born out of displacement, need,” Hagan explains. “It’s the most temperate city in the country, and it’s where a lot of people end up when they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

These days, a lot more Vancouver films are grounded in the region where they are shot, says VIFF director of programming Curtis Woloschuk.

For a long time, that was the exception.

Out of film school, Hagan and Hepburn weren’t seeing films they were interested in being made. So they made their own. Starting with a short that played TIFF, then the feature “Never Steady, Never Still,” followed by “When the World Broke Open,” and others.

Many of the company’s Indigenous themes are no accident. Hagan is Métis and says he “kind of came up in filmmaking with the Indigenous film community in Canada.” He says that there’s a lot of Indigenous talent that lives and works out of British Columbia. “There’s so many communities and so many interesting specific points of view, and such dramatic beautiful landscape scenery all over the province. There’s a lot of opportunity for storytelling and talented folks out here.”

A decade later, eight of the company’s 10 films have been first features, most of which were directed by B.C.-based filmmakers and are set in the province. “That’s kind of been part of our mandate as well… just being inspired by the place that we’re from and wanting to tell stories that are actually based here.”

Sophy Romvari was born in Victoria and raised on Gabriola Island and in Nanaimo. Despite now living in Toronto, she returned to shoot her deeply personal film, “Blue Heron” — a Canada-Hungary co-production — in the place she grew up in. It went on to premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and win TIFF’s Best Canadian Discovery Award. She returns to VIFF this year as a guest curator of Leading Lights.

Romvari says that she “had never seen Vancouver Island in a film before, certainly not as itself, as Vancouver Island, and I thought that was such a shame because it’s such a beautiful and stunning landscape.”

Access to public funding for the arts, she says, helped her create the version of the film that she wanted to. In the U.S. system, “I would likely have to build it around cast and recognizable cast.”

Woloschuk, who began programming Canadian shorts in 2013, says many aspiring filmmakers would leave for greener pastures once they were done school. Now he sees more remaining and a more “harmonious balance” between industry and community. He points to a camera rig moving directly from Oz Perkins’ “The Monkey” to a slow documentary about oyster farming as a “wonderful illustration of how the Venn diagram between the community and the industry is very much overlapped now.”

Indeed, community plays a big role. After the pandemic, Filmable, a filmmaker-run grassroots organization was founded, helping create a space for both above- and-below-the-line workers, with the support of numerous industry partners. “I don’t think I’ve ever really seen anything quite like Filmable,” says Hagan, “It breaks down some of these artificial barriers that typically exist” between producers and crew.

That sense of community is also central to producer Chris Ferguson, whose Oddfellows banner has become a significant force in Vancouver’s independent film scene. Ferguson has produced a string of high-profile indie films — including Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” and “The Monkey” — while continuing to work with the local crews and filmmakers who helped build his career.

He believes that success in the independent world is less about individual filmmakers breaking out and more about being able to find collaborators to work on each other’s projects. “So building more interconnectivity and relationships internally in Vancouver will lead to more success.”

Despite independent filmmaking being overshadowed by the city’s service industry, the resulting infrastructure has also helped nurture the independent scene. When he was starting out, Ferguson recalls vendors giving him free equipment for weekend shoots—support that made those early films possible.

Today, “you’re seeing more of a resurgence of an indie scene, of something exciting in the community that exists beyond just servicing American movies.”

Rather than competing with studios, Ferguson built his own network of department heads that come out of the indie world who have grown together. “By doing our smaller shows that broke out, suddenly they’ve got a name for themselves and they’re highly sought after.” He says that he’s still working with many of the same people he has for the last fifteen year, having built a “small bubble of people who are passionate about making indie films.”

Like Romvari, he thinks that public funding is a key piece of the indie ecosystem. Ferguson says access to government funding, including Telefilm support, is “part of why we can be something other than a service system.” Without opportunities for young filmmakers to get their first features made, he says, “I don’t think we’d have anything beyond a service industry here.” Ferguson now has access to funding through the highest end of the indie and studio world, but says he likely would not have been able to get his own start without Telefilm funding for his first film.

His own trajectory highlights how an indie ecosystem can feed into the broader industry. Through Oddfellows—and, with Perkins, having co-founded the horror-focused production company Phobos—Ferguson has become particularly associated with independent horror. “Backrooms,” which was made for under $10 million, became A24’s highest-grossing worldwide release of all time,

“Horror is a genre where you can cut through to a pretty high-concept, big idea that can sort of translate to a bigger stage without necessarily having to have the resources of a giant sci-fi movie or the star power of a giant comedy or a giant drama,” Ferguson says.

The producer pool is becoming more experienced, says Woloschuk. Five years ago, he was seeing projects where it was “evident how much the budget has been stretched. But today he sees a “better understanding of the budgets that are required to make the films that people are looking to make.”

He also points to filmmakers like Romvari increasingly looking to international and interprovincial co-production partners “to expand that resource base to make the films” although he says that existing opportunities “aren’t being fully leveraged” yet.