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Filmed and produced entirely in Alberta, Father of Nations gets CIFF world premiere

The faith-based film will have a limited theatrical release in Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Medicine Hat at Cineplex Odeon Theatres starting Oct. 7

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A brutal, post-apocalyptic drama with an entirely Albertan cast and crew makes its world premiere Saturday at the Calgary International Film Festival for an already sold-out debut.

The good word for those hoping to catch Father of Nations — directed by Cochrane’s Aleisha Anderson and starring Calgary’s Nathan Horch — is it’s also having a limited theatrical release in Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer and Medicine Hat at Cineplex Odeon Theatres starting Oct. 7.

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In production around the province since 2017, the film follows Horch’s character Jacob roaming a fire- and war-ravaged Earth with humanity teetering on the edge of extinction.

Existential crises

Along the way, Jacob finds and loses the people closest to him, and while he believes in God, repeatedly sinks into hopelessness, including a moment where he can’t go on and decides to end his own life. Indeed, one of the core conflicts weaving throughout the film is this crisis of faith in a world which God has seemingly abandoned.

For Anderson and Horch, who co-wrote the film, the pandemic made the already difficult business of filmmaking enough of an added challenge to supply the two with plenty of existential angst of their own.

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Horch talks about inhabiting Jacob weathering his trials in a sequence shot in segments over five years in locations around the province including Hilda and the badlands around Medicine Hat, from the heat of summer to -40C snowstorms.

“It was a long time to have to maintain not just the look, which changed over the movie because it spans years, but to be in that emotional state,” Horch explains.

He said it’s a grim world with plenty for the character to wrestle with.

“A lot of films, when they do deal with faith, it’s about whether you believe or you don’t believe,” says the 38-year-old actor-filmmaker, who also did the score. “But with Jacob, we wanted it to be someone who kind of has to believe almost whether he wants to or not. (He’s) dealing with the complexities of, what if you sometimes get along with God and sometimes don’t get along with God. But he’s still real to you, just like the burned land.”

The actor pauses, then chuckles. “I hope I didn’t become too much of a grump.”

At which point director Anderson chimes in. “There were days where we were deep, deep in character,” she says, adding to Horch’s laughter.

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Amid the cast of 20 are a number of Edmonton actors, including Lindsay Christopher, Jeffrey Sawalha and Morgan Leblanc — as well as Calgary’s Griffin Cork, who’s part of the Thousand Year Films team with Anderson and Horch that produced this one, its first feature.

All the wrath

While the writers approached the film from a religious perspective, they didn’t hold off on foul language and truly awful situations, like Jacob screaming the f-bomb early in the film while struggling to bury someone in frozen ground. And not unlike Netflix’s Midnight Mass, believers and non-believers get screen time to argue their philosophical points of view.

“We didn’t want it to feel isolating,” says Horch.

“Even when we had moments that one character could perceive as a miracle,” he adds, naming a plot development we won’t spoil here, “it could also be just chance from another perspective. We didn’t want the supernatural thing to be necessarily definitive.”

Anderson, 42, weighs in, noting the cast and crew were a mix of believers and non-believers, and the movie is intended for everyone.

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“It’s really about a journey to find hope, to find purpose in pain,” she notes. “And in this post-apocalyptic setting, we explore all these various human emotions that we all go through, including grief and gratitude.

“When you’re tackling an issue like death or the end of the world, faith tends to play into that. But what we tried to do is demonstrate various characters that have different ideologies and belief systems and provide a platform for them to explore that and express that within this story.”

Art imitates life

Filming during the rising pandemic was especially interesting with a cast and crew coming from different ideological backgrounds, says Anderson, as everyone wondered how bad it was going to get.

“It was almost one of those scenarios of art imitating life,” she says. “And all the people that worked on it had all these various perspectives. We could really see that playing out in front of us, that tension, as people discussed and tried to navigate what was happening in the world around them.

“So in a sense, it was almost therapeutic to go through making it.”

Between them, the two mention The Road and Children of Men as films they admire, and While Father of Nations is ultimately a tale of hope, be warned, it goes to some horrifying places along the way, including Jacob discovering the ashes of discarded babies.

“That was one of the things making this film,” says Anderson of determining where their boundaries were set. “Like, we’re gonna go there.”

Check cineplex.com for screening details near you.

PREVIEW

Father of Nations

Where At CIFF Saturday (sold out) and Cineplex Odeon Theatres

When At Cineplex starting Oct. 7

Tickets cineplex.com

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