Alien Short Film Seed Propagates at Calgary International Film Festival

Mike Tan and Roger LeBlanc in Seed.

An alien critter wreaks havoc and finds unlikely friends while traversing the Canadian wilderness in Seed, the latest short film from Cameron Macgowan, premiering this month at the Calgary International Film Festival.

Macgowan describes Seed as a homage to one of his favourite films, the 1952 Canadian short film Neighbours. “I was actually going to title this ‘Neighbours Part Two’ but then I realized that joke is kind of niche,” Macgowan says with a laugh. Growing up, he was fascinated by the strange short films that came from the National Film Board of Canada, whose experimental works remained on rotation with cable access.

“There used to be a lot of really weird short films that we'd have to watch on TV back in the day when you only had three channels,” Macgowan says. “There'd be an occasional short film that would really just blow your mind… and there were also these really great short films that they would show on Sesame Street in between the cool puppet antics that just seared themselves into my brain.”

Inspired by his love of the NFB’s animated short films, Seed’s creature was animated by artist Jarrett Lee Sitter, in a style Macgowan compares to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. That meant the film’s lead actors, Roger LeBlanc and Mike Tan, had to perform opposite an invisible character.

“I wrote the script with them in mind, I use the term ‘script’ loosely as I really just wrote a set of Charlie Chaplin, Looney Tunes style silent bits and then I kind of let [them] roll with it because I trust their instincts.” His trust comes from years of friendship, which deepened while working together on his 2019 film Red Letter Day. Despite the pair not having any scenes together, Macgowan “always wanted to see what dynamic they would have together because they're two people that I admire dearly.”

Working with the pair on Seed was the perfect antidote to the grind of feature filmmaking. “It was a great experience making my first feature film, but it was exhausting,” Macgowan says. In contrast, Seed was filmed amongst friends in Kananaskis, “we were really just playing Mortal Kombat and [making] zany art. It was really a nice holistic experience” he says. “The only stress really came when we filming in some hot springs and there was a long line of people waiting to access [them] but they were too timid to tell us to wrap it up,” Macgowan says. “So apologies to the six individuals that had to wait half an hour for us.”

This spirit of friendship and community carries through to Macgowan’s view on Alberta filmmaking. “I've been making movies in Alberta for going on 15 years now. And I really just love the camaraderie that's been involved in my time in the Alberta film scene. There's a willingness to find common ground and to not compete with each other unnecessarily… here we really do just want to see each other succeed, which I find really inspiring.”

It’s fitting that Seed will play before Steven Kostanski's Deathstalker, a director Macgowan deeply admires. “I've been following the career of Steven Kostanski since he was 16-years-old as the youngest member of Astron-6,” he says. “He got to direct an amazing sequel to Leprechaun, (Leprechaun Returns) which I'm a huge fan of, and his own movies like Psycho Goreman that I found very creative and existentially fulfilling.”

Macgowan says he was “extremely happy” with the pairing of the two films, “it feels kind of like when you would see a Looney Tunes cartoon before The Maltese Falcon… I really appreciate when there's a pairing that might not exactly [be] connected but that is thematically on the same wavelength.”

Seed will precede the film Deathstalker, which has its Alberta premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival on September 25. There will be a second screening at the Chinook Cineplex on September 28. Tickets are available at www.ciffcalgary.ca.