The curtain is closing on another season of movies presented by the Central Canada Film Group (CCFG).
The group shows Toronto International Film Festival movies and a series of lesser-known classics.
The May 31 presentation of Dogpound Shuffle at the Dorothy Ash Theatre at Hapnot Collegiate was the CCFG’s final film of the season.
CCFG member Colin Davis selects the films played in the group’s “Films You May Have Missed” series.
“I sometimes quip and say it’s more like ‘Colin Davis inflicts his personal taste upon the public,’” Davis said with a chuckle.
The group started seven years ago with the goal of creating a production company in Flin Flon. Davis said membership drive presentations of classic films proved to be more popular than film production.
“Our founder never came to our film viewings and he remained our president,” he said.
Davis, who was educated in film before transitioning to teaching. After the group ran out of historically significant films to show, they screened lesser-known movies. The CCFG has been showing these films for more than five years. Davis introduces the films before playing them and helps walk the viewers through classic movies.
“We just kind of ran out of A-class films,” Davis said. “There were all kinds of B-class films we could have shown and that would have just ruined it. So in order to keep things good, we thought there’s all kinds of great films that exist out there that a lot of people probably just have not seen.”
One of those films is Dogpound Shuffle. Filmed in Vancouver in 1973, the low-budget movie stars Ron Moody, who won a Golden Globe for his role in the musical Oliver and David Soul, who also starred in Starsky and Hutch.
Due to the film’s budgetary constraints, the film used no sets. Director Jeffrey Bloom instead used real locations in Vancouver to tell the story.
“Vancouver back in the early ‘70s was not the place it is today,” Davis said. “It was a bit of a gritty place. They’re purposely trying to show the underbelly because it’s a story of a homeless man.”
The original goal of the group may come to fruition this fall. The CCFG will teach two classes at Hapnot Collegiate, instructing students on how they can shoot using the technology they already have access to.
