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Interview: Joel McConvey, Geoff Morrison and Ryan Noth

NATIONAL PARKS PROJECT produced by Joel McConvey, Geoff Morrison and Ryan Noth. A FilmCAN/Primitive Entertainment release. 127 minutes. Opens Friday (May 20). See listing.


The idea was simple enough. Gather 13 filmmakers, match each with three musicians and send the quartets into Canada’s national parks to make a short film. At least it sounded simple enough when Joel McConvey, Geoff Morrison and Ryan Noth hatched it on Toronto Island.

“It was that great mix of frustration and idealism that everyone talks about,” McConvey says when the four of us sit down for a coffee on College. “Like, ‘No one cares about Canadian film.’ Perhaps in doing this next thing we can make them care, you know? Can we change this? Can we engage people?”

The result is The National Parks Project, a meditative anthology film supplemented by a TV documentary series, a soundtrack album and an elaborate website. It’s almost exactly what they imagined making five years ago.

“We did set out with a master plan,” Noth says. “We wanted to make a series of short films, we wanted to put out a soundtrack, we wanted to make an interactive piece, we wanted to document the whole thing. Literally, those were our four goals.”

The National Parks Project starts a week-long theatrical run at the Royal on Friday, with special guests and Q&As scheduled for every screening. Tonight (Thursday, May 19) is given over to a massive soundtrack release party, with more than a dozen of the project’s musicians assembling to perform beneath Noth’s live mix of clips from the feature and accompanying documentary.

The project will likely confound traditionalists hoping for a stately celebration of Canada’s glorious landscape. “It’s not the Heritage Moment thing,” McConvey says. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“It was almost amusing when we’d watch the footage for the TV show,” he says. “So many directors had one or two things they would always do: they were looking for the layers in a place, or they were trying to avoid clichés.”

“They were trying to avoid postcards,” says Morrison.

McConvey laughs. “You’d have all these art filmmakers who’d say, ‘I can’t shoot this. It’s too beautiful.'”

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