Hamilton stars at the Hamilton Film Festival
The 21-year-old film event features 100 shorts, documentaries and features, from established and new filmmakers, shown over 10 days. Here we talk with festival director Nathan Fleet and Hamilton filmmakers Rita Chiarelli, Liv Ellis, Maddy Foley, and Jeff Robinson.
The Hamilton Film Festival works every year to earn the Hamilton in its name, says festival director Nathan Fleet.
“We make sure that we have screen time for local movies, locally made movies, even for emerging filmmakers from the city, because it's only fair that they get a chance to see their work on the big screen to see how it translates on the screen in front of an audience. So, we don't shy away from the fact that there’s going to be at least between 10 and 20 movies that are from Hamilton, out of the 100 that we show.”
The festival has grown from approximately 15–20 films in its first year to about 670 submissions in what is now its 21st year.
The festival is centred at the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre, but has screenings at The Westdale and Playhouse Cinema. Cable 14 will also broadcast four hours of HFF selections.
The festival presents independent shorts, features, documentaries, and genre blocks based on submissions rather than fixed categories. It’s an almost constant cycle, says Fleet. A month after this festival ends, HFF will start accepting films for 2027.
Fleet stresses the truly independent nature of HFF selections for audiences.
“The movies we show will very likely never cross their path again in their entire lifetime. So these are movies that generally don't have distribution, so they're not going to end up in in Cineplex next week. They generally don't have any celebrities,” he says.
And they won’t ever show up in an algorithm.
“These are movies that are made by passionate artists that do it because they love what they do. So I call them indie gems. They're all indie gems, and you know they'll never be around, probably, in the city again. They'll just go off into the world, you know.”
The festival includes all the screenings, but also workshops, master classes, panel talks, and networking events for those in the industry. It has grown by leaps and bounds since its first festival in 2004.
Fleet has been involved since the festival’s founding and has served as director since 2008.
“I was there on the day we sat at a table and decided to call it Hamilton Film Festival. That was at the Staircase Theatre,” recalls Fleet. “I just went around and asked my friends if they had a movie to show, and we were showing on VHS and DVD.”
By its third year, submissions started to flood in from Toronto. And when HFF joined FilmFreeway, a service that allows filmmakers to digitally upload their movie once, and then submit that version to 100 film festivals, rather than sending out 100 DVDs, submissions poured in from around the world.
HFF was getting about 1,000 movies, which was too much to sort through to make selections, says Fleet. He quadrupled his entry fees to try to stem the tide. But among about 14,000 film festivals globally, FilmFreeway rates the HFF among its top 100.
The festival is also a Canadian Screen Award qualifying film festival for shorts and documentaries. To be considered for a CSA, a film must have letters from two qualifying festivals.
Expansion into the newly Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre in 2022 enabled the launch of the Hamilton School of Media Arts serving kids, teens and adults, along with offering pre-production, production, and post-production services, rehearsal and editing facilities, and a vocal booth for the film industry.
So the festival serves filmmakers with a film ready to show, but also those just starting out, says Fleet.
The HFF pitch contest, which started five years ago, features 10 filmmakers, who are filming in Hamilton and ready to go into production with six months. The winner, who is selected by previous pitch winners, gets $1,000 from the HFF, $1,000 from the Ancaster Film Festival, and Hamilton Film Studios puts a location package together worth about $500.
“And then through our film school, we have a never-ending amount of assistance to give. If they need somewhere to run auditions, if they need somewhere to rehearse, if they need to sit at a computer and do some editing, if they want to use it as a production office. It's just whatever they need.”
The festival shines a spotlight on Hamilton, but the motivation for launching the festival was selfish, says Fleet. He didn’t want to keep up his weekly trips to Toronto to see independent movies.
“I would get on a GO bus, head to Toronto, and find some indie theaters, indie film festivals, and watch indie movies, there wasn't anywhere in Hamilton [that showed them]. And I don't mean like independent theatres like [the now closed] Broadway cinema or Westdale. I'm talking about like movies made by people that are three minutes long and are abstract and weird,” says Fleet.
“So we started curating stuff that was really indie, nothing with celebrities in it, nothing that had distribution. We just wanted like raw indie movies. And we've had movies over the past for sure with celebrities in them because you can't avoid that now. But the early motivation was just I just wanted to see some really cool independent films.”
This year’s Hamilton Film Festival will also include the work of Good Shepherd clients through the Art House Hamilton project and the Emerging Filmmaker Shorts program. More than 50 clients of Good Shepherd’s HOMES program participated in the Art House program, which was designed to foster recovery, community connection, and creative expression among people with lived experience of mental health challenges and other barriers.
“The participants really brought these films to life,” says Kire Paputts, Art House facilitator and Canadian film director and screenwriter. “My role was to facilitate the process, support their ideas and help bring their vision to the screen. But beyond the technical skills, this project has created connection, confidence and a real sense of accomplishment.”
HOMES provides housing and supports to people living with mental health issues who have experienced homelessness or are at risk of being homeless.
Three short films will be shown at a special community screening on Tuesday, Oct. 13, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at The Westdale. A Q&A will with the filmmakers and Good Shepherd staff will follow. The films will also be screened at the Hamilton Film Festival on Oct. 18 at 3:30 p.m. at the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre.
THE PROGRAM
The 10-day festival kicks off Friday, Oct. 16, 6 p.m., with a red-carpet gala at the Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre. That will be followed by 11 film shorts made by local filmmakers, starting at 8 p.m.
Among some highlights throughout the festival:
Phreaker is a thriller about a lonely and blind 15-year-old boy who joins the underworld of phone hackers and earns a spot on the FBI cyber squad’s most-wanted list. Inspired by a true story, filmmaker Adam Yorke filmed in Hamilton and Brantford. Oct. 17. 7 p.m., Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre.
The Murder That Never Happened is a documentary from filmmaker Catherine Legge about an innocent man on death row in the United States and the Canadian investigative journalist who investigated the crime and its fallout. Some scenes were shot at Digital Canaries in Hamilton. Oct. 18, 6:30 p.m., Ancaster Memorial Arts Centre.
Hamilton natives Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and current Hamilton resident Jayne Eastwood are featured in the documentary You Had To Be There, about the 1972 Toronto production of Godspell that launched many careers. The musical also featured Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, and Paul Shaffer. The documentary has its Hamilton premiere Sunday, Oct. 18, 3 p.m., at Playhouse Cinema. Eastwood will do a Q&A after the screening.
Click here for a full Hamilton Festival schedule and ticket links.
MEET SOME LOCAL FILMMAKERS
Rita Chiarelli – Voices from a Concrete Ceiling
It will be a full-circle moment when Hamilton blues singer Rita Chiarelli settles into a seat at Playhouse Cinema to watch her film Voices from a Concrete Ceiling. The Playhouse was the place she first sang publicly at the age of 14. She won an Italian singing contest.
Her film takes place in a women’s maximum-security prison in Topeka, Kansas. Chiarelli captures the stories of women entangled in cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, and systemic failure.
It explores humanity, redemption, and the power of storytelling as the women discover their voices through writing poetry and lyrics about motherhood, survival, grief, and resilience. The incarcerated women include a 13-year-old girl serving a life sentence and a young mother incarcerated for defending herself against an abusive stalker.
The film culminates in a concert by the inmates that is described as “a cathartic expression of unfiltered emotion and creativity that offers the inmates a fleeting but profound sense of triumph over adversity. This is more than a performance, it is a declaration of existence, a moment of healing, and a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit.”
This is Chiarelli’s second film project. The first, Music From The Big House, saw the Chiarelli travel to Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary, aka Angola Prison. It used to be the bloodiest prison in the United States.
The trip turns into a historic jailhouse performance, with Chiarelli playing alongside inmates serving life sentences. The film was directed by acclaimed Canadian director Bruce McDonald.
This time around, Chiarelli served as director and producer and with a tiny crew of two camera operators and a sound person – all women – Chiarelli spent a month visiting the prison, teaching the women about singing and songwriting. Most had no musical experience.
But music is just the vehicle for connection and expression, says Chiarelli. The film really explores our “capacity for forgiveness, our capacity for compassion for these women. Some of it is heavy, but it's triumphant as well.”
Chiarelli has been working on this film for nine years and says there are times when she didn’t think it would be finished. Beyond the long shoot on site, crafting an 86-minute film out 110 hours of footage is an expensive endeavour.
But Chiarelli says she couldn’t let it go, because these inmates had opened up to her, taking a risk to share their stories. She put in her own money when fundraising fell short. She credits her co-producers for not walking away.
“When you don't have money to finish, you have to find the people that have as much passion as you do,” she says.
“I don't know how to tell you any differently. I just cried when I saw the pieces of footage. I would still cry like two or three years later.”
She was struck by the lack of choices many of the women had, the level of desperation and need that led to their crimes. Chiarelli says people tend to open up to her, because she comes at listening with no judgement.
Chiarelli has won more awards than any other female blues artist in Canada. She’s won every award there is to win in the blues and the words queen and goddess are frequently used to described her. She’s also as Hamilton as they come.
So when it came time to decide where to debut her film, she chose her hometown over Los Angeles. The screening, Sunday, Oct. 25 at 1 p.m., will culminate a tough journey to get the film out there. Friends and family were worried about her stress and disappointment and urged her to give up, says Chiarelli.
“I'm proud of it. I'm proud of myself a bit, too.”
Liv Ellis – Sugar
At just 21, Liv Ellis is screening her third film at the Hamilton Film Festival. She was the winner of last year’s pitch contest and the result is Sugar, which will debut on Friday, Oct. 16 as part of a screening of local shorts.
The pitch contest was the morning after her movie There Goes the Bride was shown at HFF last year and Ellis didn’t have anything prepared to submit. But she’s always sitting on a “mountain of ideas” and she was inspired by all the networking with filmmakers she was doing at the festival.
She signed up for a last-minute slot and stayed up to sift through old ideas. She submitted the idea for Sugar – about a boyfriend baking a cake for his girlfriend.
“The next morning I woke up and I was like, ‘This is a terrible idea. No one is going to vote for this. This is a horrible plot of a movie. It's like it was just not good. So I quickly rewrote, and I had this idea of these like gangster men going through relationship turmoil, and it was supposed to be called the Old Boys Club but I signed up with the name Sugar, so I had to pitch this idea under this other title.”
She had never pitched a movie and didn’t expect to win the contest. But she did.
“So a big thing for me, especially being Hamilton born and raised, I love the city so much. I take a lot of pride in it, and I want to show it off. So it was really nice, getting to participate in the Hamilton Film Festival pitch competition, and then I was privileged to receive funding. From the Hamilton City Enrichment Fund, too.”
She filmed at Rosale’s Diner on Dundurn Street South and Boulevard Billiards on York Boulevard.
Ellis developed a love of films during mornings with her dad, watching movies before school. They weren’t always age appropriate, she says, but it lit an appreciation in her. As she grew up, she developed her own tastes, but it wasn’t until she went to the Hamilton Film Festival three or four years ago that she learned about the world of independent cinema.
Until then, “movies were just these hundreds of millions of dollars blockbusters with explosions, and they were just so unattainable that [I decided that’s] not a career path,” she says. “Until I went to the Hamilton Film Festival and learned about independent cinema and how accessible it really is for artists, and that's when I kind of grew that appreciation I have for cinema even more, learning about this whole new side of it that I didn't know before, and then also discovering how, maybe that is something I could do.”
She also met Nathan Fleet and began to take film classes. He started to line her up with local production assistant jobs and Ellis began to develop her own networks. And at 17, she made her first film.
“It was a zero-dollar budget. Basically, I joined all these Facebook groups, and I was putting out casting calls and crew calls. And I'm just some high school kid with no money, asking a bunch of people to work for free on this like film that I want to make. Which, looking back now, I can't believe I even was able to make a film like that. It was so ambitious of me.”
The 26-minute romance Cursing My Name was screened at the Hamilton Film Festival in 2023.
Ellis is studying advertising at Mohawk College, and co-operates a commercial production company called Yearbook Club.
“So commercials are a really great way as a director to grow more portfolio and direct a bunch of smaller works that are easier to write, produce, turn around, put out into the world.”
When asked about her future ambitions, Ellis says she once dreamed of an Academy Award.
“Now, I just want to make work that reaches people and makes people feel seen, or makes people laugh, or makes people feel angry. But when people watch my work, I just want them to feel something, and I think that's super important for me.”
Jeff Robinson – Jingle Man
Waterdown resident Jeff Robinson is an animation director by day and an indie filmmaker on nights and weekends. He’s made seven shorts and his first full-length movie, Jingle Man, will be shown at this year’s Hamilton Film Festival.
“It was an ultra-low budget affair. You know, five people pulling a wagon full of gear. You know, half gear, half cooler with snacks and drinks, and we're just running around the streets with a permit and a camera and a couple actors making a movie. I mean, that’s as indie as it gets.”
Jingle Man is about two struggling musicians who fall in love on Queen West in Toronto. One writes jingles for a living, while the other is chasing the singer-songwriter dream. It’s largely shot in the city to the east, but Hamilton’s Boxcar Studios and Picks and Sticks make an appearance, too.
The movie was filmed over 13 days this summer. Next summer, Robinson plans to shoot a film entirely in Hamilton.
Robinson says his career straddles two sides of the film industry. One is big and slow-moving, like a cruise ship. The other nimble like a speed boat.
Robinson wrote and directed Jingle Man. He operated the camera and produced it, too.
“I had a person helping with lighting. I had a hair and makeup artist and a sound person, and then whatever buddy I could scrounge up to pull the wagon around. You know, I'm shooting the scene and passing my phone around to put your lunch order in while we're doing the thing. It's so awesome, but it's like it's polar opposites from my day job stuff.”
Robinson has succeeded at the highest level in animation. He’s a 2022 Emmy winner, for a show called Endlings for Apple and the CBC. But working in live action allows for low-budget risk-taking. That comes with the hustle of applying to film festivals, and accepting the inevitable rejection letters that follow.
“You have to not pay attention to that because, you know, the rejection doesn't mean that your thing is bad. It just means that it didn't fit what they were doing. But it never lands that way. It always feels like a rejection,” he says.
He submitted Jingle Man to about 20 festivals and hoped to get into two – the Hamilton Film Festival and the Toronto Indie Film Festival. He succeeded with both.
Robinson has had shorts shown in Hamilton before.
“It’s quite impressive, actually, how this thing has grown, and what Nathan's managed to do with it. It reflects the overall film industry in Hamilton, how that's grown, too. It used to be the crews would come in and then go home. But now, there are a lot of filmmakers and people in the film business who actually live here, so that makes a big difference.”
Maddy Foley – Fivehead
Actor, writer and producer Maddy Foley grew up just minutes away from the home of the Hamilton Film Festival. But this will be her first year there. It comes just weeks after her film Fivehead also debuted at TIFF.
“I'm really excited to screen in Hamilton because I have still some friends in Hamilton, and we're actually screening like down the street from my parents' place. So it's very meaningful.”
Fivehead, a 19-minute dark comedy-horror, draws on Foley’s own experience of getting teased as a kid about the size of her forehead. When a woman, played by Foley, gets a caricature drawn and the artists draws an oversized forehead, it opens an old wound.
“It's sort of like obsession comedy where it's just one person taking something way too far, which is a style of comedy I love.”
Foley wrote the script and served as executive producer. Her friend Christian Smith directed it.
She says the validation of getting into TIFF and HFF is satisfying because many good short films don’t get any traction.
“I think I'm really philosophically getting to a point with filmmaking where I'm kind of just wanting to make art that is something I want to make, and not worrying too much about the outcome.”
While at TIFF, Foley attended the Hamilton House event hosted by the Hamilton Film Board, and it opened her eyes to the opportunities for filming in her hometown.
The Ancaster native did plays and musical theatre growing up and she acted in a couple of short films in high school. She went to the University of Toronto, where she studied psychology and political science, and expected to go to law school. But she began to audition for acting roles and got an agent and decided to take some time to pursue her love of acting after graduating.
“And here we are, 10 years later, still doing it.”
Over her career, Foley has added to her skill set, taking a screenwriting course at UCLA and learning to self-produce.
“But the way I've landed now, after kind of having two pretty slow years financially, is essentially just I feel like I'm as much of a writer as I am an actor now, and with those two skills, ultimately you can write a lot of scripts and you could sell them, but there the sort of missing link is like learning how to produce and how to actually make your own thing.”