February 2014 update: Down River opens at Fifth Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver on March 14. Helen Shaver has been nominated for for Outstanding Performance Female at the 2014 ACTRA Awards and Colleen Rennison has been nominated for for Achievement in Music Original Song at the 2014 Canadian Screen Awards. It was the winner of the most popular Canadian film at the Vancouver International Film Festival and was chosen as the Best BC Film by the Vancouver Film Critics Circle. The story below was written in October 2013 in advance of VIFF.
As memorial tributes go, this one is larger than life.
Down River, which screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival, is about three women and the friendship they each have with a neighbour, Pearl, a charismatic and caring woman who inspires them to new heights. For their own reasons and demons, they rely on Pearl for emotional stability. And then, one day, shes gone.
The movie was written by director Ben Ratner, who was inspired by his great friend and colleague Babz Chula (My American Cousin, Double Jeopardy.) For years before her death in May 2010, he had helped rally Vancouvers film, television and theatre community to raise money to help pay for her cancer treatments, never giving up hope until the very end. He was with her friends and family at her bedside when she died at the age of 64.
Every person touched by Chula in life, and in the making of this movie, has had to take their own journey through love, loss, grief and acceptance.
Down River is like a pilgrimage, Ratner said in an interview with WE Vancouver at VIFFs media launch last month. All of these people are together on the walk and its a final goodbye to Babz.
Many of the people he cast were also close friends of the actress, a Leo and Gemini award-winning favourite with directors both on and off the screen. Helen Shaver plays Pearl, with (as described by VIFF), Gabrielle Miller (Corner Gas, Sisters & Brothers) as Fawn, a talented but insecure actress; Colleen Rennison (DaVincis City Hall) as Harper, a gifted rock singer teetering between self-destruction and self-discovery; and Jennifer Spence (Stargate Universe, Continuum) as Aki, a scatological artist who emerges from under her paint-stained hoodie like a drunken butterfly.
Ratner describes them as beautiful women doing interesting, unpredictable things.
Asked how he learned how to create strong women characters, Ratner said inspiration came not just from Chula, but from all the women hes worked with as an actor, director and coach. Theres also the life journeys hes taken with his wife, Jennifer Spence, who he says plays the character thats most like him in the movie. (The paintings that she paints in Down River were actually painted by Ratner.)
Ive spent a lot of time hearing womens stories and hearing what they go through, he says.
Spence says that when she and Ratner are working on auditions together, they bicker. But when hes directing me, its very special. The women, who all had to dip deep down into their emotional well, could do so because they had absolute trust in Ratner as a director. They could reveal some of their most intense emotions, offer them to him as a director and know hed treat them gently and with respect.
If you dont have trust, you cant get the performance, Spence says. He encourages us to bring it forth and, because we have the trust, we can do so.
Jay Brazeau, who has a role in Down River (as well as That Burning Feeling, which is also screening at VIFF), says acting in movies such as this is a positive cleansing.
"We carry this hate, this love and sadness; we can open it and share it, Brazeau says.
Down River screens Oct. 5 at 6:30pm at the Vancouver Playhouse and Oct. 9 at 4:30pm at the Rio Theatre. Tickets at VIFF.org.
