I Heart Regina 2010
I so enjoyed the process of making River in 2007, working with a small crew and first-time actors, that I wanted to encourage other Regina filmmakers to consider trying these methods out.
My spouse Wanda Schmöckel and I had watched the anthology film Paris, je’taime, which was part of a series of anthology films set in cities like New York and Berlin. We joked about doing something like that in Regina, and then realised it wasn’t such a bad idea. We took the idea for a Regina-focused anthology film to the Saskatchewan Filmpool and they agreed to come on board with equipment and facilities support. SCN agreed to give us a pre-license broadcast fee, which meant we’d be able to supply filmmakers with gear and enough money to feed and transport their volunteer casts and crew. We gave the Filmpool ownership of the film.
We started with a group of about 5 filmmakers in Regina that we knew, and from that group we developed a long list of potential directors, which had more than 40 names on it. In the end, the initial group voted on which filmmakers to invite onto the project. As much as possible we wanted the film to reflect the diversity of filmmakers in the city.
Along the way, we lost a few of our invited filmmakers: Zarqa Nawaz, Corey Generoux and Gabriel Yahyahkeekoot had other commitments and had to leave the project before they could shoot their films. In the end, we had a film with 13 stories, 14 directors, and hundreds of volunteer cast and crew.
One of the I Heart Regina directors Lowell Dean directed an episode of Hollywood Saskatchewan that looked at the making of the film.
Every filmmaker was responsible for putting together their own cast and crew, and securing their own locations, but we made sure people were shooting in different geographic parts of the city. For my I Heart Regina contribution, I designed something that allowed me to work with two young actors, Judy Wensel and Kate Herriot, and to shoot in an all-too-common feature of Regina – a parking lot. Wanda collects long-form jokes and she told me one that her friend Bert Kish had told her – we don’t know the origins of the original joke writer. I adopted the joke for my film, and Judy really nailed the telling of it. I would work again with Kate on Resting Potential.
Every filmmaker was responsible for editing their own film, and then Wanda and I put the films together linked by transitional scenes shot by Nils Sorensen. We asked animator Adrian Dean to develop the opening title sequence.
We didn’t know it at the time, but I Heart Regina captured Regina’s filmmaking community at its peak. The project brought together people from the busy industry (Corner Gas, Little Mosque on the Prairies, lots of features) and the independent community centered around the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative. As we were finishing the film in early 2010, the Saskatchewan Party government under Premier Brad Wall suddenly announced it was shutting down our provincial education network Saskatchewan Communications Network (SNC), which had been one of the early supporters of I Heart Regina, and played a key role in the significant growth of film and tv production in Saskatchewan. In 2012, Wall’s government cut the provincial film tax credit program, and very quickly, a robust industry started to wither. Many of the people who worked on I Heart Regina left the province for the greener production fields of Manitoba, Alberta, B.C., and Ontario. The next decade saw record growth in film and television production in Canada, except in Saskatchewan, which saw its production revenues plummet. I contributed an article to the Saskatchewan Filmpool’s Splice Magazine about the project and the aftermath.
A 10th anniversary screening took place in 2020 in the midst of the Covid lockdown. In light of the conditions, we did it as a drive-in event in the parking lot of the Centre of the Arts. Prior to the screening, some of the filmmakers got together on Zoom to talk about the project.
