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A Different Celebration

Daniel Stedman’s short is invited to the prestigious Berlin Film Fest

by MATTHEW HAYS

Montreal Mirror, January 31, 2002

Typically, short films get the short end of the deal in terms of getting seen. They occasionally appear on TV. They should be featured much more frequently as openers for feature films (instead we’re usually inundated with wretched ads). As a result, lively, funny short films often simply don’t get the attention they deserve.

Local filmmaker Daniel Stedman is getting a great shot in the arm in response to his latest four-minute short, Celebration. The film, coproduced by Thomas Haydn of DeZember Productions, has just been invited to premiere at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival early in February.

Stedman, 23, says he made Celebration because he wanted to explore ideas surrounding “finding your identity.” The film has a young, unnamed lad, looking no more than six years old, stepping out in front of a crowd at a bar-mitzvah-esque celebration. He stutters at the microphone, barely able to cough up the words he feels he must say, but eventually does: “I… I am… I am a homosexual.”

It’s a quirky little film, but it packs a wallop, toying with our expectations. “I spent two years working on the script,” reports Stedman, “and it’s only four pages long. But I really wanted to open questions up to the audience, rather than answering things for them. For me, the film is about the tragedy of having to find labels for ourselves. Then, you’re judged critically for those labels.”

For Stedman, the idea of ritual was crucial to the film. “I was thinking about certain rites of passage for young people. And definitely, bar mitzvahs came to mind. But the film really is more about labels.”

Stedman’s surreal and abstract treatment of his material does mean the project is open to interpretation. I read the film as deeply ironic, seeing as the crowd collected at the celebration responds so positively to the child’s coming out (something that doesn’t usually happen in real life). “I can see that interpretation,” says Stedman, who’s not gay himself. “I wanted the film to be both beautiful and tragic, a film about the struggle of identity.”

Though Celebration is having its world premiere in Berlin, Haydn reports the film has now confirmed its North American premiere for the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

“I’m really psyched about Berlin,” says Stedman, who will accompany his film there for its Feb. 6 debut. And Stedman, who originally heralds from Maine, credits a lot of the film’s success to Montreal’s industry atmosphere.

“There’s a great deal more support for the arts here,” he says. “There’s a lot of opportunity. Montreal is a great place to work in film. Canada, generally, is far more supportive of the arts.”