Academy award nomination gives hope to local film studio

By Steph Crosier

A Belleville production company says once your nominated for an academy award, like Quebec film “Monsieur Lazhar,” it makes it easier to get your projects off the ground.

“It gives the rest of us hope,” said Adam Gray of Paradocs Productions.

The Belleville based production company is owned and operated by the Gray brothers. Adam and Andrew Gray went to film school in Montreal, lived in the big cities, and then moved back to Belleville ten years ago.

“We decided to come back to Belleville where we grew up and family was,” said Gray. “We started doing our own thing here and broke into directing our own documentaries, television documentaries, and been doing that ever since.”

When the brothers first moved they were trying to figure out how they could make a living so they joined the Quinte Arts Council.

“We sort of submerged ourselves in the local community,” said Gray. “So I was on the board of directors at the Quinte Arts Council and sort of involved there for a year or two.”

Once the Grays’ got busier though they left the council to focus on filming and family.

The council has very little filmmakers as members and currently has no programs in place to support emerging filmmakers in the Belleville and Quinte area.

“I’m not sure that is a focus of theirs,” said Gray.

Carol Bauer, in charge of member services at the QAC, said its not that they can’t set up a program, it’s that there are very little resources.

“Lack of resources and finding manpower,” said Bauer. “We’re kind of in transition because we’d like to gather information from the community.”

Though they’ve never shot in Belleville, the Gray brothers do all the post-production work in Belleville and are able to communicate with their producers in Toronto using Skype.

“In this day and age you really don’t need to be in Toronto to work with people in Toronto. We do everything over the internet,” said Gray. “Our producers, and all the people who fund our films are in Toronto, but we rarely have to meet in person.”

One of the Grays’ producers is Adam Jordan of The Film Works Ltd. He confirms that they talk either of the phone or over Skype, and sometimes they travel to Belleville for a visit. Jordan’s partner, Paul Stephens, has a cottage just north of Belleville and that is how he met the Gray brothers.

“We did go down to Belleville a couple of weeks ago to sit in together for a day and look at the current cut and talk about it,” said Jordan.

Paradocs Productions is now working on feature length documentary for the Movie Network and Movie Central. Gray said it is their biggest feature so far. A documentary about Colton Harris-Moore, a man who has been charged for the thefts of a boat, cars, at least 100 home burglaries, and a small aircraft he used fled to the Bahamas, all before his 19^th birthday.

The Film Works Ltd. started in Toronto in 1975. Having produced a number of films, this year their film, “In Darkness” has grabbed international attention.  It has been nominated for best foreign film under Poland. Though the film was written by Canadian David Shamoon and has Canadian producers, it was agreed that the film would be spoken in Polish, German, Yiddish, and Ukrainian. Jordan said it will be weird to compete against “Monsieur Lazhar,” the Canadian film nominated for the award as well.