Young Vancouver filmmaker Jay Rathore has something in common with most independent artists: he is waiting for his big break. So when he stumbled across something called Cinecoup online, he thought it might be the chance he was looking for. Turns out, it was.
The film accelerator program, launched by a Vancouver online entrepreneur, has given Rathore and 14 other filmmakers the opportunity of a lifetime. Next January, Rathore could be sitting down in a Cineplex theatre to see a screening of his very own major motion picture, Grade Nine.
“It would totally change my life,” says Rathore, before he pauses and contemplates potentially receiving the $1 million in financing that will be awarded to one film in the Cinecoup accelerator project. “It would be like all of these years of grinding would have come to something that was real, something that I dream of. I have every intention of continuing to make films regardless, but something like that is truly a once-in-a-lifetime break.”
Jason Joly, founder and CEO of Cinecoup, first came up with the idea for a filmmaking accelerator project while having drinks with some of his independent film buddies on a business trip to Toronto. Joly, a digital agency owner best known for building a social media platform called DimeRocker, says it was his friends’ complaints about the film industry that got him thinking about how he could help.
“I was listening to them talking about how they can’t do anything and how everything is broken in the industry, and as an entrepreneur, when you hear pain, you see opportunity,” explains Joly. “So I started to really research the state of independent film and I thought, ‘What are they talking about? This is like the best time maybe ever to be an independent filmmaker.’”
Joly realized what filmmakers have now that they didn’t have in the past is the freedom and technology to create films without the same costs and restrictions. The only thing missing, he says, was a platform to build an audience. “I said to myself, ‘Wait a second, I’ve already built that!’”
Soon Michael Kennedy, executive vice-president at Cineplex Entertainment, was on board to provide theatres to screen the winning film. Cinecoup was in full production.
A filmmaker’s vision
When Rathore was growing up in northern BC towns like Vernon and Prince George, he saw violence around him in the towns and the schoolyards every day. The bullying, epic schoolyard scraps, and worse (“Sometimes it seemed like nice kids in small towns had to fight to stay alive,” he recounts) stuck with him long after he moved away, went to film school in Victoria, and moved to Vancouver to delve into film production work and his own independent filmmaking.
When he stumbled upon the Cinecoup film accelerator online, it clicked that this screenplay called Grade Nine that he’d been working on for a couple of years, and that had been germinating in him since his childhood, actually had a chance to make it to the big screen.
On May 1, Rathore and his team, along with 14 other aspiring teams of filmmakers, stood in the Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas lobby in downtown Vancouver and watched their two-minute trailer, the first step in what they hope results in a full-length film version being screened in Cineplex theatres next January. After all of the aspiring filmmakers in attendance had their trailers played, Rathore was thrilled when Cinecoup announced that his film had advanced to the Top 15.
“We made the cut!” he emailed Nexus the next morning, after being selected.
Not a competition
Joly and the Cinecoup team are sensitive about the film accelerator program being referred to as a “contest” or a “competition.” Even though the number of teams has been slimmed down from 90 applications to 40 selected, to 15 finalists, and soon down to 10 (the top 10 will be optioned for development; one will receive $1 million in production financing and the Cineplex release), all of the projects will benefit from the program, according to Cinecoup.
But, in essence, it’s a competition.
“It is really competitive, so it does still feel like a competition,” says Rathore, whose team has been completing weekly tasks on tight deadlines for the accelerator project.
And while Joly admits Cinecoup is very competitive, he’s focusing on the term “accelerator” for the project because it paints a better picture of what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Teams of filmmakers are being pushed to the limits, he says, and that’s way more exhilarating than yet another competition or contest that we can see every time we turn on prime-time television.
“It’s a tough-love approach,” says Joly. “The idea of an accelerator is what would have normally taken me two years on my own, and I might have flailed and never met those connections I needed, we compress that into four months where you get a really fast yes or no, instead of a lot of long maybes, and if the teams can make it through to the end and they really succeed, it could change someone’s life.”
The independent spirit
Ultimately, Grade Nine will see some sort of release, whether it’s at a Cineplex or not. The reason why Rathore’s film will have a life outside of Cinecoup, even if it’s not chosen, is that it truly is a labour of love. But it’s the knowledge he has gained through the film accelerator program that will pay dividends for his filmmaking career.
“They see filmmakers like us as small businesses and you have to do it all. They are teaching us a ton. It’s like a crash course in becoming your own publication company,” says Rathore. “And we’re not making a movie to please any agencies; we’re making it because it means something to us.”
The participating projects will soon be cut again from 10 down to five, and a jury of industry professionals will select the winning film concept at the Banff World Media Festival on June 10.
Joly has also imagined what it will be like next January when he takes his VIP seat in a Cineplex theatre and watches a film that he was partially responsible for bringing to the big screen. He’s thought a lot about the reaction he’ll have as he watches a young filmmaking team realize their wildest dreams through a project that he created.
“It’s going to blow my mind. It’s already blowing my mind when I see the quality of these trailers,” he says, pausing to prepare his formative statement on something he claims could help change the film industry, “because there’s a lot of haters for what I’m doing in traditional media. People thought I was crazy and I was just going to get a bunch of shitty YouTube videos. But I didn’t believe that. I believe there are a lot of talented people out there that the current system doesn’t touch. These could be the next Reitmans or the next Cronenbergs.”
And then Joly says it exactly how he wants to say it: “Like, there could be those three women from Brandon, Manitoba who grew up with HD cameras that can just murder it, because it’s just so much a part of their vocabulary.”