Well, it's been three days since the official end of VIFF, and all us film fiends can finally begin to reflect on this year's festival. As the schedule dwindles, we can look back and begin to separate the favourites from the failures... start putting bets on who'll be the next art house sensation and who might be an A.D at Treehouse in a year's time. There were even a few opportunities to start framing Oscar predictions, and a personal festival highlight - Benoit Pilon's The Necessities of Life - was one of those opportunities. The movie was recently voted most popular film at the Montreal Film Fest, and it's been selected as Canada's entry for best foreign language film at this year's Academy Awards. It's playing tonight as the the second last movie in the VIFF Repeats lineup, and is the perfect way to cap off a great year.

I caught up with Pilon during the festival, and was able to chat about this distinctly Canadian film. In the first of a two part interview, he speaks about his personal background, the genesis of the film, and the pressures of working with Inuit star Natar Ungalaaq...

While I'm pretty sore that I only managed to catch a handful of films at this year's festival, I do feel privileged to have seen The Necessities of Life. The film takes place in Quebec circa 1952, following an Inuit hunter with tuberculosis as he's forced to abandon his family and enter a sanatorium just outside of Montreal. Feeling lost in the white urban world of the hospital, he falls into a deep depression until taking charge of a young Inuit boy, who helps revive his will to live through a reconnection with the traditional way of life. It has the feel of one of those top-quality, sweeping historical dramas that emerge from Hollywood - without the usual overdose of cliche. Its inspiring that this is a Canadian made production, and even moreso that it's the first feature from a rising talent, as this feels like a work of utter maturity.

Benoit Pilon graduated from Concordia University in Montreal, where he made the short La Riviere Rit, which went on to win best fiction film at the '88 student film festival. He went on to found Les Films de l'Autre, and has since been involved in a number of widely praised and award winning documentaries...

This is your first feature length fiction film. I was curious, how did the turn to fiction come about? Were you drawn to this particular story, and thus impelled to break from the realm of documentary... or did you actively decide to pursue a full length feature, finding the story in the process?

Well, it's a bit of both. First of all, it's not quite a 'break' from documentary, as I made fiction films before I started making documentaries. I made shorts and mid-length films, like 34 minutes [the award winning Regard Voles]... my first films at school and outside of school were all fiction. I came to documentaries more by accident - or rather, the accident of life: meeting people, getting curious about people, etc. That's what brought me to documentary, and I just happened to get a little more famous for those types of film.

But, I also directed 15 hours of a TV series Reseaux, and I also worked on professional sets for TV series and professional films as an Assistant Director for eight years (while I was also shooting my own little documentaries), so I do have quite a lot of experience with fiction. And I always, since going to Concordia to study film, it was always my aim to work with actors and eventually make a feature fiction film...

This script was presented to me by the producer of Bernard Emon's films, who is a pretty famous director in Quebec. He had written the script in the early 90s after going to the North as a video trainer for Inuit people in town settlements, through the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. He spent months and months over there, hearing all these stories about tuberculosis in the 40s and 50s. He was very touched by that, and wrote the script in the early 90s. Emond never really intended to direct the film - because of co-production it was complicated, and it didn't work - but a few years ago, his producer Bernadette Payeur from ACPAV handed me the script and asked me if I would be interested in doing it.

I was really, really touched by the story. The way the story is told - very simple and slow yet so touching and profound. I also really enjoyed the fact that he was telling a story that had never been told before. I'd never heard about this issue of TB among the Inuit people, so I thought it was a way to move towards a story, people, and actors I wouldn't be able to work with or meet otherwise.

After reading the script, right from the beginning I thought of Natar Ungalaaq, from The Fast Runner, to play the part because we needed someone that you would become attached to right from the start of the film. It's a pretty rough start to the story, the first half-hour, following this man who is sick and wants to die, and you need to care for him.

Ungalaaq puts in an amazing performance. Like you said, he previously starred in the award winning Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. I wonder, with that film still looming strong in the Canadian consciousness as the only major feature focused on the Inuit, did you ever feel like you were filming under it's shadow? How much was that movie 'on the mind', so to speak?

If you start thinking like that, you can't operate. Also, I could have been overshadowed by the importance of the work of Bernard Emon, whose films have gone to Cannes and won prizes, and now I'm directing a script by Bernard Emon! Of course it's there subconsciously at least, somewhere on the mind... but it's really something you just need to shut out as a filmmaker.

My big question about working with Ungalaaq was: what kind of actor is he? His film was made by Inuit people, about Inuit people... and I mean - "The Fast Runner" is a wonderful fiction film, but it has this documentary-esque, realistic approach to it that only Inuit people could have ever accomplished. So I was wondering: how will I manage to communicate with him? It was a big question. How would I be able to talk to him, and have us understand each other?

The film does speak from the Inuit perspective quite a bit...

Yeah, that's what I wanted. I wanted the film to be felt through the eyes of this man. So I had this first meeting with him in Iqaluit about a year before we started shooting and I asked him to play a scene or two just to see how I could react to what he would offer me... get comments on how he would react to my comments, etcetera. And right from the beginning it was like magic. He's a gentleman and he's a natural, because he never went to play school or anything, but he still knows a lot about the techniques. He's been behind the camera a lot, making hours and hours of TV programming for the Inuit, so he knows about lighting and sound and camera techniques. He speaks English but he's a man of a few words - so really, after awhile film was our universal language, and it became really easy to communicate with him....

Keep your eyes peeled for part two, where Pilon elaborates on the difficulties of creating a film about the Inuit culture as an 'outsider,' and why he thinks movies like The Neccesities of Life are vital to our cultural healing.

The Necessities of Life plays tonight at 7:00 in the final evening of VIFF Repeats.