EXCLUSIVE: Jacob Stefiuk from Montreal was part of the 2023 Telluride Film Festival student symposium intake — where Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins sharpened his filmmaking chops 20 years ago — and the experience has been life-changing.
The town of Telluride is tucked into a box canyon surrounded by towering picturesque peaks in the southwestern neck of Colorado. There are parks, waterfalls and river walks.
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It was here last year that Stefiuk was able to clear his head and write the most personal section of his first film, a 22-minute short called The Clearing. “It was the first film that didn’t involve school,” says Stefiuk, who studied film production at Concordia University in Montreal.
I met Stefiuk and other students at last year’s Telluride. He recently sent me a copy of The Clearing, and it’s a beautifully poetic work that he shot in the Gaspésie region of the St. Lawrence River.
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There’s a prelude where a character recites the line, ”The people we love, the things we care about, they’re never far away from us.”
It stayed with me and I wanted to know the circumstances behind him writing it.
Stefiuk recalled toying around with that line and others while sitting for hours by the lake in Telluride’s Town Park, close to the Werner Herzog Theatre. His grandmother had been ill at the time, and she was very much on his mind. “I ended up writing a bunch of little poetic monologues and whatnot. And that sort of came out from that time.”
He returned to Canada from Colorado and completed his screenplay about an estranged stepson who returns home at the behest of his stepfather, whose wife is unwell.
Stefiuk began the process of assembling a bare-bones crew that often doubled duties. Most were friends with whom he studied with at university or he’d met on other sets. There’s a sort of reciprocal arrangement of helping one another out.
During his years at school, he’d been putting money aside from working jobs such as fixing bikes — a passion. “So all through four years of school, I’d been putting money aside and had a little nest of money that was put aside.”
“So production was, I’d say, about seven grand Canadian for pre-production and production,” he explains, adding that “a further $2,000 for post came through an arts foundation in Montreal. That was really, really, really helpful,” he says with a big smile.
The cast and crew all were paid, he tells me. For financial reasons, it was a non-union production, “but I paid them $500 each for the shoot, which is not much, but they were all doing out of friendship because at that point we’d all recently graduated within the last year. Everyone rotates on each other’s sets, so it doesn’t feel like anyone’s really being taken advantage of because everyone’s kind of working for each other.”
He adds: ”All the people that have been on my set, I’ve been on their sets too or been with stuff that they’ve been involved with. It’s really kind of like a family.“
Ingunn Omholt, the actor cast to play the mother figure Elaine, originally is from Norway and had lived in Montreal for several years before settling in Toronto. She responded after seeing a casting notice on Facebook.
Jacob met her for coffee, and she was cast on the spot.
The production found Frédéric Lavallée, an actor well known in the Quebec short-film scene, to play Aaron, the stepson character.
The part of John, the father figure, is played by Bob Eichenberger, who seemed strangely familiar to me, though Stefiuk assures me that Eichenberger never had acted before.
Stefiuk and his DoP Calvin Liu were shooting some exteriors when “this guy walks up towards us and he’s like, ‘What are you up to?’ We explained what we were doing, and we started chatting and he ended up just being a quirky guy. He had such a great personality, and I thought to myself, ‘If I don’t find an actor, I’m going to get this guy to be the actor.’“
Three weeks later, Stefiuk called Eichenberger. “And I said, ‘Hey, remember me?’”
Eichenberger, an environmentalist, had never acted before, but, as Stefiuk says, “he’s always telling great stories, so he’s got a good demeanor for acting.”
The Clearing didn’t make the cut for this year’s Telluride, but he’s keen to get it into short-film festivals in North America and Europe.
And he’s already thinking about his first feature, which will be a personal project based on his great-grandfather who immigrated from Ukraine to Canada in the 1930s “right before the Stalinist Russia era” and left his family to come to Alberta, where he worked on a farm for 20 years before moving to British Columbia to raise a family.
Half a century later, the great-grandfather returned to his homeland. ”That’s was crazy; what was that? There’s a whole storyline that I’ve heard of from my grandfather, and I want to explore why a lot of Ukrainian culture hasn’t been carried over, and it’s because there’s a traumatic history involved.”
He talks about Ukrainian Orthodox churches that were built by immigrants “when they came over, they brought their culture and their tradition with them.” But then those churches ended up being abandoned, “and they’re kind of just sitting there dormant. And to me that was kind of the perfect analogy. But coming over, they established their new life and then, whatever, over a certain amount of time, they’re kind of just forgotten about it.”
Stefiuk is seeking funding from various cultural organizations in Canada to enable him to fund research and pre-production for the project.
It’s a long way off, but I hope Stefiuk gets to premiere it at Telluride — just as Barry Jenkins was able to launch his eventual Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight there back in 2016.