COMING INTO BY CARSTEN KNOX
T
ara Thorne had always dreamed of being a filmmaker. As an arts journalist she’s rubbed elbows with filmmakers and actors, regularly attending the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2007 she made a short. On the morning of her 40th birthday, Thorne was on the phone with EI. She’d left her gig as a writer and editor, and things weren’t going well. “Your life is half over, you have no job, what are you going to do?” she says. Through the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP) she tried Writing Small, a writers’ workshop. It’s geared to polish scripts for Telefilm’s Talent To Watch, a national financing program, giving filmmakers a chance to make micro-budget first features in the $150,000 range. In the stack of ideas Thorne had for a movie was a feminist revenge drama. Her mentor at AFCOOP, filmmaker Iain MacLeod, suggested she do that one. “I was wondering, ‘What if women were as violent as men?’” At the time she was chronically angry in the wake of #MeToo. “You have to get to 40 to accumulate that many micro-aggressions,” she says. “And I learned in that time how many of my close friends experienced sexual assault.” Thorne’s first feature, Compulsus, was shot in the spring over 15 days. But one movie doesn’t make a career, especially in Nova Scotia. In many ways it’s no easier DanCallis
Starring Robb Wells, the drama Dawn, Her Dad and The Tractor shot in Halifax at the height of the pandemic.
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