Donald Shebib will see ‘Nightalk’ debut at this year’s TIFF; his first feature film in a decade and written alongside Claude Harz
On a sunny, dreamily warm September afternoon, Donald Shebib is lounging on a placid, backyard deck at a colleague’s West Toronto home. The filmmaker, often considered as one of the more vital voices in Canadian cinema, is uneasy about his upcoming feature,“It’s a film written by two 80-year-old guys that’s about female sexuality,” says Shebib.
The erotic thriller tells the tale of Brenda Roberto, a detective played by Ashley Bryant, who becomes involved with Tom, played by Al Mukadam, through a phone-sex app called Nightalk. He later becomes the primary suspect in a murder case but also a man who connotes the arousal and attention of Brenda.
Due to the challenges of film funding in Canada, Shebib is used to producing films on shoestring budgets. In the 1970s, he sold his beloved black and white Morgan sports car to fund“In terms of the people who run the industry, there’s a lot of big-game producers who will still never give me the time of day,” says Shebib. “We lack faith in our artists here, so they either go to the states or stay here.
He believes that storytelling isn’t as much of a prerequisite for a sellable film as it used to be. However, he acknowledges he may not be in the best position to judge, because this assumption of his means he doesn’t go to the movies as much., he says, is another extension of his desire to explore the intersections between conflict and human behaviour. It’s something he’s previously done in the 1973 crime classicthat centres on Canadian First World War veterans.