Two to Watch: Filmmakers Kuplowsky and Lysenko are Poised to Take on the Film Industry

Interviews by Olena Wawryshyn

Adrian Lysenko, age 21

How I got interested in Film: “I always knew I wanted to be a writer…I was always looking at different mediums of writing. The question was: did I want to be a journalist or write short stories or write novels? I always had a love of film and started dabbling in screenplays and getting to know the form and [learning] how to write, and it just emerged from there. I started becoming interested in films more and more and realized that this is something that I would like to do for the rest of my life.”

Education/Training:  Holds a diploma in Film Production at Confederation College in Thunder Bay, Ontario; graduated from the Grey Highlands Secondary School, Flesherton, Ontario.

Ukrainian connection: Lysenko recently directed and filmed a 20-minute documentary in Ukraine about business centres funded by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast.

Filming in Ukraine “was fantastic. It opened my eyes to a different culture. That’s where my grandparents came from, but my parents were born here….It was a very interesting and unique experience for me," he says.

Komyja, Yaremche, Rohatyn and Dolyna, the film looks at the work and successes of CIDA-sponsored business centres that offer services, such as consulting, business loans, training and English-language classes, for existing and potential entrepreneurs.

“My professor [at Confederation College] recommended me for the project because we have an international education centre at the college and they were involved in the project and various other projects similar to that in Paraguay and places like that. My professor knew that I was Ukrainian and spoke Ukrainian so he thought I’d be perfect for it.

“It’s great that they set up the business centres because people never had those resources before....I visited a number of small businesses and without the business centre they wouldn’t have existed.”

Currently working on:  A co-writer of a short film, The Remnant, Lysenko is also working as a production assistant for The Big Flip, a home-renovation television program produced by Smashing Pictures, which will be aired on HGTV in September 2006.

“The Remnant is a post-apocalyptic love story. We hint that the apocalypse has to do with fuel consumption. We shot it in a winter wasteland climate, implying that global warming has taken its toll," says Lysenko.

The plot deals with an older man, a scavenger who finds a beautiful old violin. He can’t play it at all, but meets a younger woman who is also a scavenger and one night he realizes that she was a violinist in her former life, and a bond starts to happen between them. One night he gets very sick and they have no more firewood so she has to break the violin and use it as firewood to save his life.

“I’m also working on The Big Flip as a production assistant which means that I do the odd jobs–sound, camera or lighting–helping out with whatever needs to be done.”

 Future plans: “To do as much as I can to make it into Film. Right now I plan on writing as much as I can and submitting short films to competitions. It’s more realistic to make a short film because obviously it’s a lot less money. If these short films get recognized, we can go on to making full-length films.  I want to explore the psychology of humans and relationships. I don’t think there’s one theme that I don’t want to touch. I’m not limiting myself to one category or genre.”

Peter Kuplowsky, age 19

How I got interested in Film: “When I was a kid, for many years I was remaking Star Wars with the family camera. I like telling stories, and I love this medium. I now discovered how much I love documentaries, real stories. I went to the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal two years ago [where] I saw a film about a squid that fights people. It was a silly movie, but the audience got into it so that by the end of it people were shouting and clapping… I was just in awe of that experience of being able to motivate a crowed like that.

Education/Training: Studying for an undergraduate degree in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto; graduated from the Etobicoke School of the Arts, Toronto.

Ukrainian connection: Volunteer with Children of Chornobyl, 10-year member of the Ukrainian Academy of Dance.

“I recently saw documentary about Ukrainians during the Second World War (Between Hitler and Stalin)…It’s a whole period of history that is really ignored in Ukraine, and I think it has to be explored…There are a lot of interesting stories to be told in Ukraine.”

Biggest film project to date:  Co-Director of The Bloor Cinema Documentary, which premiered at the Bloor Cinema in October 2006 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Toronto theatre.

“We [co-director Robin Sharp and Cooper Sanborn] had talked a lot about different ideas and had done a lot of random writing…but we hadn’t shot a full-length feature since grade 11. My manager [at the Bloor Cinema] announced that, it’s the 100-year anniversary of our theatre coming up and we thought, ‘Really, 100 years!’  We couldn’t believe the theatre had been around for that long. We went to the Ontario and Toronto archives and it just exploded from there because there was so much information.

“I co-directed and wrote the narration with Robin and had my mother (Win Kuplowsky) read the narration. My friend Cooper is really talented at editing…We tried to put a lot of attention to sound and mixing to make sure that it sounded and looked great.  When we screened it the first time at the Bloor, the Jewish Film Festival programmers were there and they said: ‘We’d like to programme your film because we play all our movies at the Bloor, so we’d love it for you to enter it into the festival.” I’d like to get it out to as many short film festivals as I can.

Currently working on: “I’m involved with two film festivals; one this February, the U of T Film and Video Festival. I’m working in the marketing department, distributing movie trailers. The process has been really interesting. Screening the films and watching other student filmmakers has been a huge learning experience for me. The other film festival I’m working on is being run by a guy called Adam Lopez whom I met this year by working at the Bloor Cinema. He is hoping to start a film festival of genre movies: horror films, science fiction films… Our plan is to have a massive four- to five-day festival in October.”

Future plans:  “To start a production company with my friends, make movies and get into the industry. I want to tell stories that people are going to enjoy.  I love to write my own stories …and directing–those are my dreams.”