MERIT MOTION PICTURES’ SPECIAL ED WORLD PREMIERE AT HOT DOCS

For Immediate Release (TORONTO) — Merit Jensen Carr, whose Winnipeg-based production company, Merit Motion Pictures, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, received an anniversary surprise of her own today — the announcement that she had won documentary’s Don Haig Award, to be presented by the Hot Docs Board of Directors on May 3.

The Don Haig Award is presented to an outstanding Canadian independent producer with a feature-length film in competition at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, running April 25-May 5.

The Haig Award recognizes Jensen Carr’s creative vision and entrepreneurial spirit as embodied not only by her Hot Docs Festival film entry, Special Ed, but also by a substantial body of work spanning her entire career to date.

Special Ed, a 100-minute feature documentary produced by Merit Motion Pictures and directed by John Paskievich, an award-winner in his own right, has its world premiere tonight at the TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 at 6:00 p.m. ET. The film has already made several of the best-of-festival’s top titles to see this year.

Founded by Jensen Carr in 1988, Merit Motion Pictures has been in the vanguard of Canadian production companies for the past two decades. As well as highlighting her creative leadership as executive producer of all the company’s films and shows, the Haig Award also acknowledges the mentoring of new Canadian filmmakers, something that comes naturally to the veteran producer. Merit’s great strength has always been her knack for finding great stories, and for assembling teams to turn those stories into great films. Her steady drive and eye for excellence in both projects and people have pushed the company into the forefront of Canadian independents specializing in dramatic and documentary films.

“This is an amazing honour,” Jensen Carr said of the Haig Award announcement. “My thanks go to the board of directors of Hot Docs and to the late Don Haig, one of the true heroes of this industry, and another Winnipegger.

“I love what I do and the people I work with, it’s that simple. We work together on wonderful projects, full of beauty, insight and hope. There’s nothing more I could want.”

Recent work includes TutuMuch, an international festival favourite that was exhibited nationally in Cineplex Odeon theatres and is slated for release in New York this year; the long-running Gemini Award-winning documentary series Recreating Eden; the international co-production transmedia series One Ocean and One Ocean Interactive (winner of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Award); and Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour, a Canadian Screen Awards winner this year.

Merit also sits on the board of On Screen Manitoba, and is chair of DOC Winnipeg, and co-chaired the federal task force on the non-theatrical film industry.

Special Ed screenings at Hot Docs:

Mon. April 29, 6 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox 3

Tues. April 30, 10.30 a.m., ROM Theatre

Sat. May 4, 9.15 p.m., Innis Town Hall

Screening with Citizens Against Basswood

PRESS RELEASE

Smarty Plants, Surviving:) The Teenage Brain, Faking the Grade go for the Golden Sheaf Awards!

Winnipeg-based Merit Motion Pictures is proud to announce that its newest documentaries “Smarty Plants,” “Surviving:) The Teenage Brain,” and “Faking the Grade”[as "The Cheating Class"] have been accepted into the Yorkton Film Festival’s Golden Sheaf Awards  2013.  YFF will take place in Yorkton, SK from May 23-16, 2013.

Additionally, “Smarty Plants,” has also been accepted into the International Wildlife Film Festival [IWFF] in Missoula, Montana. The 2013 IWFF will take place from April 27- May, 2013.

Produced by Merit Jensen Carr and directed by Erna Buffie, “Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour” is a 2013 CSA award-winning documentary that follows University of Alberta scientist and ecologist JC Cahill on a spectacular visual journey into the hidden lives of plants. Traveling the world, from the Great Basin Desert to the rainforests of British Columbia, Cahill meets up with a team of amazing plant scientists who are revealing an extraordinary, secret world – a world where plants behave a lot like us.

Surviving:) The Teenage Brain uses a combination of outlandish “Jackass” style YouTube videos, new scientific research and a graphic novel approach to present cutting edge research from renowned scientists around the world that challenges preconceived views about the turbulent teen years.  The program originally aired on CBC’s the Nature of Things January 19, 2012.

Produced by MMPand filmmaker Andrew Blicq, Faking the Grade looks at the increased cheating going on in our education system. For the first time, viewers will get a comprehensive look at the causes and the extent of academic dishonesty.

Smarty Plants and Surviving:) The Teenage Brain are produced by Merit Motion Pictures in association with CBC’s The Nature of Things, with the participation of the Canada Media Fund, Manitoba Film & Music, the Government of Manitoba – Manitoba Film and Video Production Tax Credit and the Canadian Film and Video Production Tax Credit.

Faking the Grade is produced by Merit Motion Pictures in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and with the participation of the Canadian Media Fund, the Rogers Documentary Fund, and with the participation of the Government of Manitoba– Manitoba Film and Video Production Tax Credit and the Canadian Film or Video Tax Credit.

SPECIAL ED screenings at Hot Docs:

Mon. April 29, 6 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox 3

Tues. April 30, 10.30 a.m., ROM Theatre

Sat. May 4, 9.15 p.m., Innis Town Hall

Screening with Citizens Against Basswood

HOT DOCS World Premiere — Special Ed — from Award- Winning Director John Paskievich; Produced by Spellburg Pictures Inc. and CSA Award-winners Merit Motion Pictures; Starring Ed Ackerman

Toronto, March 19, 2013 — To some he’s a nonconformist and a dreamer, a modern-day Don Quixote, a genuine artist, obsessed with the alphabet, whose masterpiece remains perpetually beyond his reach, and a rare individualist in a world where quiet desperation is the general rule of survival.

And to those who know him really well, Ed Ackerman is a walking catastrophe, lost to his implausible ambitions, a manipulator of the truth or maybe a misguided genius, and definitely a procrastinator. Above all, regardless of one’s viewpoint, he’s one giant irritant.

When Ed, the one-time protégé of the National Film Board’s vaunted animation studio — his award-winning collaboration with poet Colin Morton, Primiti Too Taa, was a world-wide festival and art house hit in the late 1980s — decides to leave a legacy for his three children (all virtual strangers to him now, after two failed marriages and lost custody battles), he buys three derelict houses in a rundown corridor on the bad side of Winnipeg and announces grand plans to renovate and redeem them.

Trouble is, Ed, 52, is broke, and has next to no experience in house construction, nor the faintest idea about how to begin his massive projects, let alone how to finish them. Finishing, we learn in Special Ed, multi-awardwinning documentary filmmaker John Paskievich’s remarkable study of an artist in the dog days of a 20-year downward spiral, is Ed’s biggest problem.

He can’t finish anything, complains Ed’s son, Brandon, who is persuaded by his father to become his sidekick in the renovation farce. And to his credit, Brandon stays on through thick and thin, until Ed’s sideline dramas — playing fast and loose with city planning and zoning officials, running a rag-tag campaign first for Parliament, then for mayor, presenting himself as a rugged spokesman for the dispossessed, venting his dreams of creating a great animated movie about the alphabet — threaten to drag him under as well.

Paskievich says he chose the title Special Ed for three reasons. First, Ed Ackerman is truly a special personality, like no other. The title also implies some type of undiagnosed learning disability. While Ed rejects being labeled, he freely admits that his inability to spell caused him enormous anguish in school.

“And finally, Ed’s house renovation projects are partially motivated by his dream to establish a studio where he can complete an alphabet animation film that he hopes will serve as a form of special education for teachers to use with kids who have problems with spelling, reading and writing,” explains Paskievich, whose films Unspeakable and If Only I Were An Indian have also premiered at past Hot Docs festivals.

Ed’s ongoing relationships with the distinctive “personalities” of the individual letters in the alphabet are referenced in the film in clever stop-action sequences that are the core of his presentation to Winnipeg municipal authorities defending his claim to the endangered derelict houses.

Avoiding sentimentality and the kind of “nostalgia for the mud” trap that quirky character studies often fall into, Paskievich watches dispassionately, over three years, as his subject’s plans unravel and Ed’s increasingly antic behaviour alienates those who might have been willing to help his dreams come true.

In addition to Ed’s son, disaffected characters in his story include a loving girlfriend, a well-intentioned neighbour, a homeless friend in need of companionship, and the long-suffering by-law inspectors whom the film’s antihero so relentlessly provokes.

“Ed never lets a solution get in the way of a good problem,” says Paskievich. “Maybe I should write a self-help anger management manual for people who find themselves dealing with Ed — housing inspectors, judges, the police, film producers, neighbours friends, relatives. It would be a bestseller in Canada.”

Co-producer Merit Jensen Carr, executive producer and president of Winnipeg-based Merit Motion Pictures, has known Ed for 30 years. “His story is so endlessly fascinating that when I saw John’s footage, I just had to be a part of it,” she says. ”John has made a film that provokes all the important questions about howartists and eccentrics collide with society.”

Is Ed special? Paskievich’s film asks. If so, in what sense? Is he a playful illusionist whose passion and peccadilloes make him a true visionary, beyond judgment?

Is Ed a harmless huckster of pipe dreams who gets by on the kindness of strangers, on comic Chaplin-esque responses to a world too tough to navigate? Or is there a whiff here of madness, the kind that often accompanies then corrodes genius, when fears of failure continually prevent any kind of progress, let alone success.

In the end, viewers of this compelling portrait, shot on the streets ofWinnipeg, will have to find their own answers. Infuriating and perverse as Ed is, Paskievich provides a glimpse of something in his subject’s wounded soul and mind that begs our understanding, admiration and compassion. Whether we see it too says as much about our own humanity as it says about Ed Ackerman and his Sisyphean travails.

For information and images, go to
www.hotdocs.ca
Special Ed screenings at Hot Docs:
Mon. April 29, 6 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox 3
Tues. April 30, 10.30 a.m., ROM Theatre
Sat. May 4, 9.15 p.m., Innis Town Hall
Screening with Citizens Against Basswood

Media Contacts:

ELLEN DAVIDSON
1.905.527.1895
416.524.7198 cell
davidson.e@sympatico.ca

KAYA DAVIDSON-QUILL
416.998.5292
kayaquill@yahoo.com

Winnipeg’s Erna Buffie won Best Direction in a Documentary Program or Series for the documentary “Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour” at the 2013 Canadian Screen Awards.

The Canadian Screen Awards is hosted by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television and will be aired on March 3, 2012 at 8pm on CBC.

Produced by Merit Jensen Carr and directed by Erna Buffie, “Smarty Plants: Uncovering the Secret World of Plant Behaviour” follows University of Alberta scientist and ecologist JC Cahill on a spectacular visual journey into the hidden lives of plants. Traveling the world, from the Great Basin Desert to the rainforests of British Columbia, Cahill meets up with a team of amazing plant scientists who are revealing an extraordinary, secret world – a world where plants behave a lot like us.

Smarty Plants is produced by Merit Motion Pictures in association with CBC’s The Nature of Things, with the participation of the Canada Media Fund, Manitoba Film & Music, the Government of Manitoba – Manitoba Film and Video Production Tax Credit and the Canadian Film and Video Production Tax Credit.

For Ed, like Sisyphus of Greek Mythology, it’s the struggle itself that fills his heart. Special Ed inspires and provokes us to think about the spark that keeps us going through the good times and the bad.

IMAGES:

Now, Merit Motion Pictures and CBC Television Doc Zone are taking a hard look at this phenomenon.  In a new one-hour documentary called Faking The Grade, students, administrators, parents and teachers speak about their experiences with cases of academic misconduct, while experts provide insight into why students cheat.

International version title: The Cheating Class

British evolutionary biologist and author, David Bainbridge, leading American neurologist, Jay Giedd, and biological anthropologist, Helen E. Fisher, provide new research that explains both the peculiarities and the immense power of the teen brain and turns everything we’ve come to believe about adolescence on its head! Using hilarious, Jackass-inspired stunts, comic book style graphics and some of the best minds in the field Surviving:) The Teenage Brain looks at the science deep within the teen brain and celebrates evolution’s masterpiece – the years that bring us judgment, adaptation and innovation. This could change the way we school, parent and motivate these transitional Homo sapiens. It might even make them easier to live with

Also known as What Plants Talk About [USA]

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? What’s really at the root of society’s skepticism of the “official story?” And what type of person believes a sinister and secret society is manipulating the government? Don’t miss this fascinating exploration of the vulnerability of the human psyche.

Co-produced with vonnie VON HELMOLT film