A grassroots film gearing up for production is setting the right atmosphere with a grassroots funding effort.
Writer-director Kelton Stepanowich has kicked off an Indiegogo campaign for $25,000 to allow the public a chance to support God’s Acre, a film he describes as an “aboriginal enviro-identity film dealing with man’s connection to his ancestral homestead.”
It started while he was working as the director’s assistant on the award-winning APTN television series Blackstone that has been filmed in and around Sturgeon County. He was invited to return to work on episodes for the new season but he decided that this was the time to tackle his own passion project.
“I just thought that I wanted to do my Blackstone thing in Fort McMurray, in Wood Buffalo,” he said.
The film tells the story of Frank (Lorne Cardinal), an older aboriginal man who has lived alone in the wilderness but struggles with how the world is becoming ever different. Climate change has brought drought and flooding to his forest home, and the police – played by Greg Lawson and Roland Pemberton, a.k.a. rapper Cadence Weapon in his screen dĂ©but – must try to convince him to save himself by abandoning his homeland.
It’s a classic tale of tradition vs. adaptation with an environmental and cultural twist.
“I was always just interested in telling stories. I just found the media of film in high school and ran with it. I graduated, started my film business and keep working at it, working in film and television, doing little short films, documentaries … it all pretty much led to this point right now.”
God’s Acre isn’t necessarily derived straight out of real life in the tarsands district, he noted, but it does tell a universal story about a human problem that affects everyone.
“In Fort McMurray, development is a thing that’s always talked about. It gets lambasted for these things and in return it definitely does try to promote the positivity of the town, of which there is a lot – due to development, due to industry.”
The three-hander and the tight budget means that the project really has to be honed down to the essentials. That isn’t stopping him from striving for some big screen action. The $25,000 is only the last part of the film’s budget that is needed to accomplish the whole production. His vision is to have a lot of big set pieces, he added, with rising waters as part of the action.
“We have to build a mobile cabin that looks like it’s been there for 100 years, and then we have to push it into the water to fake the floods. There’s a quote out there: ‘We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.’ It’s going to be worth it. I don’t think there’s a film like this that’s ever been made, especially one with aboriginal people in it from the concept.”
Those characters, he said, usually get relegated to documentaries or small dramas.
The campaign started only last week and has already raised more than $8,500, one-third of its goal. There are various perks that Stepanowich is offering to inspire members of the public to offer their support, as is par for the course with most kinds of crowdfunding events.
Inherent to all levels of support is what’s happening behind the scenes. His production company, Half Breed Films, has teamed up with the non-profit Lake Athabasca Youth Council to create a film mentorship program that will allow local aboriginal youth the opportunity to learn about filmmaking while working on set.
The company is also planning to donate equipment and editing programs to the Athabasca Delta Community School, thanks to help from the Alberta Film Tax Credit. Half Breed will offer workshops for the school’s youth and faculty on how to use the equipment.
As the crowdfunding website, found at www.indiegogo.com/projects/gods-acre#/story, states, “Then the youth will be free to tell their own stories.”
