Passport to their lives

OLGA LIVSHIN

“Documentary filmmaking presents a challenge between art and business. We have to maintain our artistic integrity, to be true to the subject, but we also have to sell our product to the broadcasters," said David Paperny, an award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker.

Paperny and his partner and wife of 26 years, Audrey Mehler, engaged in a dialogue with a crowd of rapt listeners during the Filmmaker Salon at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture on April 26. The salon, organized by the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival Society, began with Mehler recounting her first meeting with Paperny at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, where they both studied for their master's of arts. Mehler, a Los Angeles native, and Paperny, a Calgarian, hit it off right away and their fruitful relationships – personal and professional – flourish to this day.

Upon graduation, they first explored the world together through photography and soon settled in Toronto, where Paperny started working for CBC, learning the language of television. In 1989, still part of the CBC crew, Paperny and his family moved to Vancouver.

"Vancouver of that time offered space and possibilities Toronto couldn't," Paperny explained with a grin. During those times of social change, he worked on many news stories, travelled a lot and found his first success as a documentary filmmaker. The couple's film The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, which chronicled the last two years of life of a young Vancouver doctor living with AIDS, was shown on CBC Television in 1991. Nominated for the 1994 Academy Award for best documentary feature, the film made a splash on national television, allowing Paperny and Mehler to go independent.

They started their production company, Paperny Films, out of their basement, making one film a year. The retrospective of their films that followed was impressive: every short clip was a glimpse into an extraordinary life, often on the cusp of transformation. "We felt privileged to tell those remarkable people's stories," Mehler admitted. "It was rewarding to be allowed into their confidence. I wouldn't want to do anything else."

The range of the filmmakers' interests is staggering. Both Jewish, they have created several films with a Jewish theme: from a Holocaust survivor's story of Prisoner 88 to the biopic Mordecai: The Life and Times of Mordecai Richler, to the account of one of the most controversial figures in Canada, a survivor of Auschwitz, a social activist and an abortion doctor, Henry Morgentaler, The Life and Times of Dr. Henry Morgentaler (winner, best biography, HotDocs 2000).

Paperny and Mehler have never shied away from polemics, choosing to document the reality rather than preach their point of view. They keep searching for provocative ideas, for people in transition, who are ostracized for their non-standard approach to life, but struggling for acceptance. That's how their series Kink was born.

It was Paperny Films' first TV series, consisting of 13 episodes that began airing in 2000. It was such a big project that the company had to move out of the basement, hire more staff and rent an office.

Strangely, the original idea behind the series was to investigate a relationship between women and their hairstylists. In a roundabout way, it progressed to the topic of alternative sexuality, because the broadcasters wanted more sex in the show. The crew started researching the subject. "When we first approached many of the people we filmed later, they were suspicious. It took time and honesty on our part for them to open up," Mehler said, adding that, "we documented the lives of Canadians living on the sexual edge. From Vancouver to Winnipeg to Toronto to Montreal to Halifax, Kink showcases the personal explorations of alternative sexuality as it is manifested in different urban centres across the country."

Paperny's and Mehler's films examine such diverse topics as food and army training, women's roles in modern society and the adventures of McDonald's in Russia. As many of the interviewees are still learning about themselves, both Paperny and Mehler consider it an honor to accompany their heroes on their journeys of self-discovery.

In 2008, one of the latest Paperny Films' documentaries, Confessions of an Innocent Man, a tale of a Canadian engineer who was imprisoned and tortured by Saudi militants for three years but never lost his courage, received the Gemini Award for best biography documentary program.

"This business is our passport into other people's lives," Paperny said. "Everyone has a story, and I'm curious to learn them all." He bemoaned the business side of his art, where he has to sell his ideas to broadcasters in order for his films to reach an audience. He also reflected on the technological modifications of the last decade and on the advance of the Internet, which draws viewers away from television. To follow his viewers, Paperny experiments with new media, striving to adjust to the changing marketplace.

"In the early '80s, CBC was a national incubator of TV talents," he told the audience. With sadness, he acknowledged that, at present, CBC is declining as a national voice. But the role of an incubator is not vacant, said Paperny, noting it's been picked up by independent companies that bloomed out of CBC's fertile grounds.

Both Paperny and Mehler relish their roles as mentors of the next generation of Canadian filmmakers. At the end of the salon, everyone could approach the couple, ask them questions, and even present them a resume for consideration.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

^TOP