Vancouver's Indie Scene Builds an Ecosystem Beyond Service Work

"Backrooms," produced by Chris Ferguson for under $10 million, became A24's highest-grossing worldwide release of all time. That single figure — a micro-budget horror outpacing every other title in the distributor's catalogue — captures the scale of the shift now under way in Vancouver.

For decades, the city has functioned as a stand-in for American locales, its tax incentives and exchange rate drawing Hollywood productions north. A younger generation of filmmakers now casts Vancouver as itself. Their projects — anchored in British Columbia landscapes and communities — are premiering at TIFF, Locarno and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Who is leading the new wave?

Producer Chris Ferguson anchors one corner of that wave. His Oddfellows banner produced Osgood Perkins's "Longlegs" and "The Monkey," and he and Perkins co-founded the horror-focused label Phobos.

Ferguson started with vendors giving him free equipment for weekend shoots. Today he runs a network of department heads who grew up through his projects. He has built, he says, "a small bubble of people who are passionate about making indie films."

"By doing our smaller shows that broke out, suddenly they've got a name for themselves and they're highly sought after," Ferguson adds.

Tyler Hagan and filmmaker Kathleen Hepburn co-founded Experimental Forest Films after film school. A decade later, the company has produced 10 films, 8 of them first features, most directed by B.C.-based filmmakers and set in the province.

What role does community play?

After the pandemic, Filmable — a filmmaker-run grassroots organization — began creating space for both above- and below-the-line workers, with industry-partner support. Hagan calls the group unprecedented.

"I don't think I've ever really seen anything quite like Filmable," Hagan says. "It breaks down some of these artificial barriers that typically exist" between producers and crew.

VIFF director of programming Curtis Woloschuk, who began programming Canadian shorts in 2013, describes a changing ratio between budget and ambition. Five years ago, projects arrived with visibly stretched finances. Now budgets match what the filmmakers aim to make.

Woloschuk points to a camera rig moving directly from Perkins's "The Monkey" to a slow documentary about oyster farming as "a wonderful illustration of how the Venn diagram between the community and the industry is very much overlapped now."

How are Indigenous stories driving the slate?

Hagan, who is Métis, came up inside Canada's Indigenous film community. The slate follows from that upbringing.

"There's so many communities and so many interesting specific points of view, and such dramatic beautiful landscape scenery all over the province," Hagan says. "There's a lot of opportunity for storytelling and talented folks out here."

Justin Ducharme's "Seventeen," produced by Experimental Forest Films, captures three Indigenous sex workers in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The film premiered at TIFF and played VIFF's Northern Lights program.

Hagan calls "Seventeen" "a bit of a love slash hate letter to Vancouver." From day one, he recalls, Ducharme framed the film as "a love letter to chosen family and to the kinships that are born out of displacement, need."

Why does public funding matter?

Sophy Romvari — born in Victoria, raised on Gabriola Island and in Nanaimo — returned from Toronto to shoot "Blue Heron," a Canada-Hungary co-production, on Vancouver Island. The film premiered at Locarno and won TIFF's Best Canadian Discovery Award.

"I had never seen Vancouver Island in a film before, certainly not as itself, as Vancouver Island, and I thought that was such a shame because it's such a beautiful and stunning landscape," Romvari says.

Public funding, she argues, let her make the version she wanted. In the U.S. system, "I would likely have to build it around cast and recognizable cast."

Ferguson agrees. Without Telefilm support for his first feature, he says, "I don't think we'd have anything beyond a service industry here." That funding stream is, in his words, "part of why we can be something other than a service system."

What's next for the ecosystem?

Romvari returns to VIFF this year as a guest curator of Leading Lights. Woloschuk says co-production partnerships with international and interprovincial partners are expanding — though not yet "fully leveraged."

Ferguson frames the goal in practical terms: "Building more interconnectivity and relationships internally in Vancouver will lead to more success."

His trajectory — from borrowed weekend gear to A24's biggest release — has become the local template. Whether the next "Backrooms" emerges from the same bubble will depend on the funding pipelines and crew relationships that bubble has spent a decade building.