By Kris McFarland
The Rideau Canal only took six years to make, but Ottawa filmmaker Jo MacFadden has been trying for almost as long to make a film based on the man who was commissioned to create the canal, Colonel John By.
MacFadden has been trying for nearly six years to get the final funding needed to bring her feature film to the big screen. She’s been promoting her script to major production companies in Canada, like the CBC, and around the world.
The film, based on the life of Colonel By, would be called The Water Man.
Bruce Elliot, a Canadian history professor at Carleton University, says the short answer to why MacFadden has had trouble getting the money needed for her feature film, is that it is a Canadian topic.
“The Canadian angle makes it difficult and the historical angle makes it even more difficult. And the fact that it’s a very localized historical angle is a third whammy,” he says.
Now, although she continues to seek funding for that film, MacFadden has also turned her attention to nine other film projects she currently has in the works.
One of these projects is a new documentary focusing on the individual stories of the people who actually built the Rideau Canal.
MacFadden insists she is not shifting gears away from The Water Man, and is continuing to work on the feature film while she prepares to make the documentary.
The documentary will be made to celebrate two upcoming events. In February, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization will consider the Rideau Canal for status as a world heritage site.
In 2007, the Rideau Canal will celebrate 175 years of continual operation.
“It’s wonderful to be doing [the documentary], but because of this deadline of 2007, I’m making extra efforts to get the feature film made as well so we can have them both,” MacFadden says.
The documentary will include re-enactments and actors giving testimonials as the people who worked on the canal, focusing on their lives and the conditions they worked under.
“We’re going to do our best to represent them properly,” MacFadden says.
MacFadden says it is her love of history and her love of Ottawa that is pushing her forward with these projects.
“The knowledge of history helps people to understand the present and make the right decisions for the future,” she says.
“A country is the product of its history, and if we don’t know all our history well, it seems to… be a great loss.”
André Loiselle, a Canadian film professor at Carleton University, agrees that there is not enough being done in Canada to preserve the past through film and television.
“The number is probably endless of historical events that are simply not dealt with in the form they deserve,” he says.
“Compared to what other nations do, we tend not to pay that much attention to our history. There have been historical documentaries or fiction films made, but those either always focus on the same event or they are so fictionalized that they don’t teach us much about our own history.”
MacFadden says that although she still has not raised all of the funding for The Water Man, or found a national and international distributor for her new documentary, there is “no point” in giving up hope.
“I’d be foolish to say that I sometimes didn’t get despondent and feel that I’ve taken on an impossible task,” she says.
“But then somebody will send me an e-mail or a word of encouragement or phone up and say, ‘I’ve just discovered an interesting piece of information, are you still working on the Colonel By story?’ There’s tremendous support.”