From Katie Scott of Global News:
Link: Yannick Bisson says 200th episode of ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ ‘snuck up on all of us’
“The loyal fan base is the reason the show is as popular as it is, and this passion for the show, the stories, the characters is what helps drive all us to ensure that it is the best that it can be and continue to improve as the series goes on.” Continue reading.
From a media release:
Nish Media launches the 2nd season of its 13-episode documentary series Skindigenous, which explores Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world. The English version premieres Tuesday, January 21 at 8:30 p.m. ET on aptn hd & aptn e and 8:30 p.m. MT on aptn w.
A Dene version will also be broadcast on APTN.
Skindigenous 2 explores Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world from Canada to the US through Asia, Africa and Europe to New Zealand. Each episode dives into a unique Indigenous culture to discover the tools and techniques, the symbols and traditions that shape their tattooing art. In this series, the art of tattoo becomes a lens for exploring some of the planet’s oldest cultures and their unique perspectives on life, identity, and the natural world. Among ancient cultures, tattooing was only practiced by those with special standing in the community. Today, modern day tattoo artists use their art to re-connect with the heritage of their ancestors and to ensure that their stories are not lost. The series celebrates both ancient and modern tattooing techniques. Many are reviving or assuring the continuation of traditional techniques such as skin stitch or hand poke. Others aim to introduce their culture to the people around them.
Skindigenous 2 visits tattoo artists in LeBret, Sask., Kahnawake, Que., Nimkii, Northern Ontario, Haida Gwaii, B.C., Iqaluit, Nunavut, New Mexico, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, India, Taiwan, Tunisia and New Zealand. Here are a few examples of the artists being profiled:
Kanen’tó:kon Hemlock from Kahnawà :ke, Que. has been helping to revive tattooing traditions that were lost as a result of colonization. In the first episode of the series, he invites us to witness the first tattooing in a longhouse in roughly 300 years.
Stephanie Big Eagle of New Mexico is a traditional hand poke tattoo artist, who weaves Indigenous activism into her designs and became a prominent figure in the Dakota pipeline protests, where her thunder hawk hand poke design became a symbol of the standoff.
Métis artist Audie Murray grew up in Regina and Lebret, Sask. She works closely with traditional Cree tattoos and Michif visual culture and uses both hand poke and skin stitching methods.
The accompanying Skindigenous app on the series website gives Indigenous tattoo artists from around the world a forum to record and view their tattoo art.
The series was directed by Nish Media producer Jason Brennan and five other directors, including 4 female directors. Jason, a member of the First Nations community of Kitigan Zibi, has produced shows for APTN, CBC, Radio-Canada, Ici ArtTV, Canal D, TV5 and CBC Docs, including the seventh season of the Indigenous youth hockey show Hit The Ice. The series’ remaining directors are: Abenaki/Mohawk Writer/Director/Producer Angie-Pepper O’Bomsawin (Award-winning Mohawk Girls, APTN’s Hit The Ice 7, CBC Kids Cultural Capsules), award-winning film and television director, editor and cameraman Randy Kelly; Mohawk Producer/Writer/Director Roxann Whitebean (Mohawk Girls, Raven’s Quest, “Top 25†in Diversity of Voices at Banff Festival), Mohawk filmmaker Courtney Montour (Flat Rocks, APTN’s award-winning Sex Spirit Strength and Working It Out Together) and filmmaker Sara Ben-Saud (Mina, presented at TIFF).
About Nish Media
The series is produced by Nish Media, a multi-award-winning production company based in the Ottawa-Gatineau area. Over the past years, producer Jason Brennan has produced over 220 hours of television for various networks such as APTN, CBC, Radio-Canada, Ici ArtTV, Canal D, TV5 and CBC Docs, including Mouki, Wapikoni, La Fosse aux tigres and seven seasons of Hit The Ice, nominated in prestigious television festivals including the Banff World Media Festival and Italy’s FICTS. Its first feature film, Le Dep, was selected to play in several film festivals including the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, the Vancouver Film Festival, the Raindance Film Festival, ImagineNative and the American Indian Film Festival. Filmmaker Sonia Bonspille Boileau’s new feature film, Rustic Oracle was presented in several festivals over the last few months. Nish Media currently has several TV projects in the works, including Season 3 of Skindigenous, the dramatic miniseries Pour toi Flora as well as the documentary Non réclamé.
How would the stresses of breaking the law—no matter how well-intentioned—affect a marriage and a family? That’s explored in Fortunate Son, CBC’s Wednesday night miniseries.
Created and written by Andrew Wreggitt, Fortunate Son stars Kari Matchett as Ruby Howard, an American activist in Canada who isn’t merely happy with vocally protesting the Vietnam War; she does something about it. That includes helping smuggle American soldier Travis Hunter (Darren Mann) over the border into Canada. And though her husband, Ted (Rick Roberts), supports his wife, increased scrutiny on the family hints something has got to give.
We spoke to Kari Matchett about Ruby, getting into character and signing on to Fortunate Son.
I was speaking to Andrew Wreggitt and I asked him about the casting of you and he said that as soon as he saw you audition, he knew that you were the perfect person for this role. What’s your reaction to that?
Kari Matchett: That’s great. I didn’t know that. He didn’t tell me that. Wow. Well you know, my initial reaction through reading the character description was, ‘I must play this part. This part is f–king perfect for me. I can’t even imagine a better part for me.’ It encapsulated so much of what I’m interested in. The late 60s … I’ve always, since my teens, been obsessed with that era. I also love what was happening at the time politically. The social unrest, the issues with inequality of the sexes, of the races. All of those things are still happening now.
And it, I felt, was the perfect time to do a show about this. And I also thought, ‘I can’t believe nobody’s ever done a show about this time, this era before.’
I knew nothing about the sheer number of Americans that were coming over the border during this time to avoid the Vietnam War. This was all new to me.
KM: In 1968 after [Pierre] Trudeau became prime minister, he instructed the border guards—which doesn’t mean they did this, but he instructed them—to not ask draft-age men, whatever in the way you want to look at them, not ask them anything about it. Trudeau stood up against what was going on in Vietnam. When you see American governance, he was anti-Vietnam. So it’s a really proud moment in Canadian history as well.
I was talking to an older friend of mine the other day and I said, ‘Look, was it the political arena that was less heated, but in terms of was it easier? Would it have been easier for Trudeau at that time to do that then, let’s say now?’ And he said, ‘No way.’ Which is why we love Pierre Trudeau. It is a real proud time in Canadian history, that Canada did that.
Getting into the characters a bit, I love the interaction that Ruby has with Travis. I just loved his performance and the scenes that the two of you had together are just fantastic.Â
KM: I loved working with him. In fact, I think Darren and I are very similar in that we’re actually quite serious and so we gave each other a lot of space and oxygen, but we also when we’re not shooting, we have a great time together. So it’s sort of serious on the set, plus it is really serious stuff, and he was going through serious stuff. Ruby’s going through serious stuff. We’re both quite quiet when we’re working and we both do our own thing and then when we’re not working we sort of have an amazing time. He’s a lovely guy. I just love him.
How did the wardrobe and hair help you get into Ruby’s headspace?
KM: Every character that I’ve done, whether or not it’s a period piece, the clothing is a major part of the character. It took us a long time with the wardrobe to find the right things that worked for Ruby. Ruby is in her mid-40s so, I mean she was born in about 1922 so it’s not like Ralph and Destiny where I was just like, ‘Let’s throw on a long skirt and big hoop earrings and let’s go do the hippie thing.’ I would’ve loved that, except that that just wasn’t the case. Women were not allowed to wear pants in institutions.
Ruby hasn’t been working in an institution for two years, but she’s still a woman who was born in 1922 and she’s a firebrand and a political activist and she’s her own woman. So who is she? The coming together of all of those worlds, how does that work in terms of what she wears? So, just naturally from having worked in Princeton, she would have had a lot of skirts in her closet that she would still wear, because she grew up wearing skirts, she’s comfortable in skirts. She wore skirts, you know, but also has to wear pants. It’s a political thing. And I’m going to wear pants because I can wear pants. But it was still relatively new for women to do that at that time.
And then deciding to wear a pair of boots because it rains a lot and she lived in a country that’s being muddy. So putting all of those things together. When we finally got to her skirts with her boots and she put her hair up because she’s working in the scarf. Then suddenly it was like, ‘Here she is.’ She appeared, but it was a lot of elements to put together to make that happen. It didn’t fall off the truck that way.
As the first two episodes unfold, there is this relationship with her husband, played by Rick Roberts. He’s into the smuggling and helping. But to a point, he’s still got to keep that front up and is urging her to keep that front up as well. It’s fascinating to see this relationship become very at odds because of this kid that she’s helping out.
KM: It’s a complicated relationship, and I mean we find out later that Rick’s character is actually sort of the original activist, but then he sort of pulled back and things changed. And, as marriages do and people evolve in different ways. He became a little calmer and a little mellower and didn’t want to be so on the front lines of the activist world. How does a marriage survive that? How do you parent together? How do kids fare in that world? And Andrew, he’s such a brilliant writer, he wrote these complicated characters in situations that were just rich.
Fortunate Son airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC.
Images courtesy of CBC.
From Bill Brioux of the Toronto Star:
Link: Healthy growth: Suddenly there’s a surge in Canadian medical shows hitting the air
Maybe it’s because of universal health care, or that our own waiting rooms and walk-in clinics are so crowded, but Canadians seem to have a fever right now for hospital-based TV shows. Continue reading.
Last week, I wrote a preview about the debut of High Arctic Haulers. The documentary series, broadcast Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBC, spotlights the captains and crews of ships delivering supplies to communities in Canada’s far north, as well as the people who rely on those supplies to arrive.
It turns out I previewed the wrong episode. Networks swap episodes all the time, and that was the case with High Arctic Haulers. The bad news? Anyone who read last week’s story and tuned into the debut was probably a little confused what they watched didn’t match what I wrote. The good news? It gave me the opportunity to cover the show again, this time by chatting with High Arctic Haulers‘ director and production consultant, Indigenous filmmaker Kelvin Redvers.
You grew up not only hearing the stories but also witnessing these ships coming in, right?
Kelvin Redvers: Sort of. The community that I grew up in was one of the starting points for some of the deliveries that went to the Arctic. And so that company doesn’t exist anymore, called NTCL. But it was a main industry in my town, which was the summer deliveries to the Arctic community. When I was a teenager, I’d actually done some documentary work on the boats that deliver up to the Arctic and I’ve always been amazed at the story. The work that they do is so necessary and important and, often, southerners know very little about this mode of delivery and actually just very little about the north in general.
It’s so foreign for someone living in Toronto to learn what these communities really rely on and if the weather’s bad, maybe they don’t get this stuff.
KR: It’s full of little small things as well too. What I love about the show is each episode kind of opens up a new layer of the complexity of challenges that we wouldn’t ever really think about. There are just so many different aspects to what these ships do and what makes it challenging that this format of having seven episodes is really fantastic. Each one opens up a new puzzle that these crew members have to solve. I love watching people who are really good at their job have to solve very difficult challenges.
What are some of the specific challenges that you had to deal with, with regard to equipment or production or weather just wreaking havoc?
KR: The production team, the team in the office figuring out logistics, had some of the hardest jobs out there in media because everything would change constantly. From day to day, even within a day, there’d be changes in terms of weather, in terms of when a ship is due to arrive. At one point we had, I think, 25 crew members spread out across five different communities in the Arctic.
And in each of those places, there are flight delays. Sometimes a bag doesn’t come in. There was a team that got stuck in for, I think, four or five days. I was stuck trying to get to Cape Dorset because there were flight delays there. Everything would change constantly. We sort of had to be really nimble and in the show you see the ship’s crew having to make decisions about where to go and what they can do based on the weather.
Even with all those challenges, anytime footage came back to the production office, it was emotional, it was moving, it was funny. It had all the elements that you would need under some of the most incredible pressures that you could ever face in a documentary series.
Can you give me a little bit of background on We Matter?
KR: My sister and I started, back in 2016, a nonprofit designed to support Indigenous youth who are going through mental health issues. And one of the main reasons is there is a lot of mental health challenges for Indigenous young people across Canada, the First Nation community and Inuits. And one of the reasons we started that was because of our own experiences being Indigenous folks growing up in the North, feeling that there weren’t many resources for Indigenous youth, but also there just weren’t many portraits of positive Indigenous role models in the media generally.
We never got to watch ourselves on TV in dramas or even the superheroes. The organization uses videos, predominantly on social media, of people talking about mental health issues and talking about positivity, overcoming challenges.
I think that affects some of the work that I do in media. And I think the sort of crossover between what this show does is that it really does present Indigenous folks, Indigenous young people, and Northerners in such a positive, inspirational way. In the premiere episode, one of the main stories is these Inuit high schoolers learning how to build kayaks and they are so excited about building kayaks and bringing in some of the materials that they need. Through the stories of what it takes to get material out, you also get to spend time with these young people and hear their humour and learn a little bit about them and see them on screen and their excitement and happiness to get these materials.
And I think that that has an impact in our country, generally, both for Indigenous folks to get to see ourselves in our homes and in our areas presented in such a positive way. But also it helps people in the suburbs or in Toronto to see a different side that you might not normally see in a news article or something more negative slanted and at the same time it’s also just a part of this incredible story that’s exciting and interesting in itself. It brings people to the table because the stories are so captivating. Then along the way, we’re teaching Canadians about themselves, showing others that yes, this is a part of your country. These are people who are contributing to what it means to be a Canadian in unique and interesting ways and really powerful ways.
High Arctic Haulers airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on CBC.
Images courtesy of CBC.
