A NSCAD filmmaking team picked up one of Canada's top student prizes for cinema: the Grand Prize in student filmmaking at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema (FNC) in Montreal last month.
A still from 'Pan & Syrinx' produced by Kate Solar (Film) and written and directed by A. Laurel Lawrence (Expanded Media).
Pan & Syrinx, produced by Kate Solar (Film) and written and directed by A. Laurel Lawrence (Expanded Media), won the Rencontres pancanadiennes du cinéma étudiant as the best of a cohort of student films that included 50 filmmakers from 27 schools across Canada.
One of Canada's most important film festivals, and the largest general-interest film festival in Quebec, the FNC showcases top national and international cinema from emerging voices to major works. The jury for the student short film competition identified Lawrence as someone "the industry should keep an eye on."
"For its exploration of form, its attention to craft and its willingness to take risks, the Grand Prize goes to a film that moved us through its bold and innovative, tender yet subversive gaze," the jury wrote. "For a memorable, cleverly revisionistic work, sculpted with a heartfelt sense of intention from concept to execution, we decided to give this award to an undeniably promising director who knows where they are going."
"It was the first time seeing it with an audience. It was magical. You could feel it in the room, it really moved people," says Lawrence. "We worked so hard for that so much of the emotional undertow of the film is attached to making this artifact with queer and trans bodies and situating them in a time, doing ballet, putting ourselves into a history."
The 16-minute 16mm short inspired by silent film, 1970s gay porn, and the French composer Maurice Ravel's "Daphnis et chloé" tells a fable of two lovers who express their feelings through ballet. Shot over a week in the NSCAD studio, Pan & Syrinx is set on two grand, practical stages: a wild, colourful drawing room of sorts, filled with instruments and revelry, then pushing through a set of pink curtains into a meticulously built swamp where Pan (Kay Slauenwhite) and Syrinx (M Black) do their dance.
"We'd show up at 9 or 10am and leave at 9pm, every day for a week," says Lawrence, who designed the production with Solar. "That swamp set the budget isn't as high as you would think, it's recycled materials, old 2x4s and chicken wire we cut up. In the late 60s, early 70s the golden age of gay porn it was New York theatre directors taking props and set pieces from Broadway backstages and bringing them to their apartments and covering everything in black felt. You could see and recognize that it was really scrappy and not what it is. That was a real inspiration for us, a tender and affectionate artificiality."
As part of their FNC prize, Lawrence will travel to Vietnam next year for the Autumn Meeting festival. Currently they're meeting with distributors to help determine the life of Pan & Syrinx that began in Montreal.
"It's a really interesting thing for every film school in Canada to send a film [to FNC]," says Lawrence, who credits professor Solomon Nagler as "the reason the film got made." "You get to see what the resources are, what the culture is like, and all the different ways of making work. It was really one of the most diverse programs I ever saw. The one thing that binds the films is they're all made at film schools, and film schools are all radically different across the country. They were really nice to our film."
