Alexander Carson celebrated his latest film, Alberta Number One - a road movie that boasts a handful of Yorkville University and Toronto Film School grads in its closing credits - at two festival premieres last month.
Directed and produced by Carson, who also serves as the Associate Chair of the Bachelor of Creative Arts (BCA) program at Yorkville, the 83-minute feature marked both its world premiere at the 53rd Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montréal, and its US premiere at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival in October.
"This is a nice success story for me personally, but also for our students. Five BCA and TFS grads worked on the film in paid creative and technical positions, which is very cool. My teaching philosophy has always included hands-on creative research beyond the classroom," said Carson.
"Creating opportunities for our graduates to apply their skills and knowledge in a fun and artistic professional context was very meaningful. Our students brought so much talent and brilliant creativity to the entire process it was very rewarding, overall."
Helping Carson behind the scenes of Alberta Number One were Class of 2024 BCA grads Tino Dihwa, who worked as Poster Designer on the film, and Mano Murali who served as a VFX Artist - the latter of whom also graduated from the Film Production program at TFS in 2022. Other TFS grads working on the film included Charles Han (2018), who worked as a Best Boy Grip, Lavpreet "Lovey" Brar (2020), who served as production designer, Noel Pendawa (2022), a Key Grip and Editor.
Photo of Alberta Number One' cast and crew by Noel Pendawa
Alberta Number One follows an eccentric documentary crew as they trek across the vast roadways of Alberta, Canada to document monuments, museums, and other roadside curios. Armed with only a loose idea of the project's final form, the wayward director struggles to manage a slew of messy personal entanglements and rivalries embroiling her collaborators. As they look for meaning in the landscape, their search turns inward as they're inspired to reckon with their own lives.
The film - Carson's second feature, following his critically acclaimed 2015 debut, O, Brazen Age - is earning the Ottawa native more rave endorsements, with author, playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill recently lauding Carson's growing filmography as one of the most "beguiling" in English Canadian cinema.
"With Alberta Number One, Carson crafts a polyphonic story in collaboration with the ensemble while bringing his slyly digressive, essayistic personal style to bear on the western and road-trip film," said Tannahill, author of The Listeners.
"The film deftly speaks to the limits of academia, art, and museology to reckon with the painful legacies of our collective past, as well as those of our living present."
Carson said Alberta Number One was inspired by his own experience living in a small, rural town in Canada's largest prairie province back in 2017, when his curiosity in the sheer volume and variety of regional, single-topic museums was first piqued. After receiving some development funding, he began researching a film that would investigate the politics of representation at these public sites - what/whose stories are privileged over others and what/whose stories are marginalized or omitted entirely.
Ultimately, he said, he aimed to discover "what the narratives told through these spaces tell us about the contemporary culture(s) of Alberta specifically, and Canada more broadly."
Alberta Number One cast at the Chicago International Film Festival. Pictured here (L-R) are Randall Okita, Kris Demeanor, Joseph Murray, Alexander (Sandy) Carson, Benjamin Carson, Kyle Thomas, and Evan Webber. Photo by Emily Broderick.
To those ends, Carson hired a team of seven accomplished Canadian artists to collaborate on the project and help diversity its perspectives - Benjamin Carson, Bebe Buckskin, Kris Demeanor, Alexandra Lazarowich, Randall Okita, Liz Peterson, and Ingrid Vargas.
"Drawing from different areas of artistic practice, levels of experience, race, gender, and cultural backgrounds, these new collaborators engaged in structured field research and personal writing practices," Carson explained.
"The material generated through this correspondence informed the refinement of the project's thematic inquiries and contributed to shaping the loose screenplay for Alberta Number One."
Six of the seven collaborators also went on to perform in the film as the character they had contributed most to shaping, while Lazarowich stayed on the project as an executive producer.
"The result is an unlikely blend of fiction with occasional moments of documentary, ranging in style between Brechtian formalism and Cinema verité," Carson said.
"Alberta Number One is a contemporary Western, a road movie, an essay film, a meta-fiction, an ensemble drama, a comedy It invites us to join a gang of documentary filmmakers as they confront the powerful narratives that have shaped Canada's dominant culture and history, while trying to find/form community within the ensemble and imagine a better future."
Watch the Alberta Number One trailer here: https://vimeo.com/1014508634
