Ina Fichman of Intuitive Pictures is at a happy place in her career as a producer.
The Wanted 18 that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last year, won the top documentary prize this summer at the Traverse City Film Festival in Northern Michigan headed by Michael Moore. She has hopes it will go on to compete for an Oscar.
The 75-minute film, co-directed by Montrealer Paul Cowan and Palestinian Amer Shomali, is set in the Middle East during the first intifadah in the 1980s.
It’s about a community of pacifist intellectual Palestinian professionals in Beit Sahour outside Bethlehem who decide to create their own dairy farm, a step in controlling their lives and providing for their own needs.
The story, based on a real-life incident, is told not only from the point of view of these men and women but also using the Animal Farm-like voices of a small herd of Israeli cows, portrayed in stop-motion animation.
The cows, purchased from a sympathetic kibbutznik, “find themselves in the middle of a mess” when Israel deems them a threat and seeks to have them removed.
One cow is depicted as a staunch Zionist, another becomes a Palestinian sympathizer and a third “goes through a metamorphosis in terms of how she feels about being part of what’s going on there.” The bovines lend absurdity and humour to the sensitive subject.
Animation was done in Montreal by a team of 10 Concordia University film graduates “working out of an old shmatte building on Chabanel that we converted into an animation studio with shooting stations,” says the producer.
Now Fichman is expanding the film’s creative footprint to include an interactive graphic novel that involves readers using their tablets to navigate through the village, choose chapters, play games and access bonus content like recipes and the story of Israel.
“It’s entertaining but at the same time, it has content. We’re offering it as a free app,” says Fichman.
Another of her projects, 100 Percent T-Shirt about the history of the T-shirt, has gone interactive, with the company website “asking people to share their T-shirt stories and photos.
“People hold onto their T-shirts for years because of memories. I still have my Camp Ramah T-shirt,” says Fichman.
“Over the next year we’re going to be choosing four causes and asking designers to create a shirt that reflects the cause. They’ll be printed and the money will go to the cause.
“The first, on the theme of girl power, is connected to a film I produced last year called Monsoon [that won the Audience Choice award of TIFF’s Top Ten]. In it, a young woman in Kerala in the south of India wants to become a nurse so we set up an education fund for her.”
An illustrious woman is the subject of Fichman’s most recent film, Vita Activa: A spiritual biography of Hannah Arendt, a Canada-Israel co-production directed by Ada Ushpiz and featuring Alison Darcy (Maurice Podbrey’s daughter) as Arendt’s voice and archival footage.
“It’s a look at Hannah Arendt’s philosophy on the banality of evil and the plight of the refugee, its connection to her life and what it means today,” she says.
“We just signed with U.S. distributor Zeitgeist and it will be released in the States early in 2016. We’re doing a shorter version for Radio-Canada to be televised next year.”
Fichman is just starting production on a sequel to Abbey Neidik’s Shekina that follows a group of chassidic girls into womanhood, with some leaving their communities. After more than 25 years working out of Montreal, with local as well as global partners, Fichman is here to stay.
