TIFF spotlight: Andrew Cividino and ‘Sleeping Giant’

TORONTO – The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing with hundreds of movies set to unspool through Sept. 20. Here’s a look at a Canadian project trying to break through at the 11-day movie marathon:

Director/co-writer: Andrew Cividino

Hometown: From Dundas, Ont., but has been in Toronto for a number of years; has lived in Thunder Bay, Ont., where the film is set

Film: “Sleeping Giant”

Synopsis: Three teenage boys push boundaries and pull pranks during an adventurous yet bleak summer in a remote Ontario cottage community.

Genesis of film: Cividino, 32, grew up on the north shore of Lake Superior. All the settings in the film are written from his own personal experience, he says.

“I grew up kind of running wild with the local boys I met up there and I always wanted to make a film that was set there, to capture the essence of what I experienced in those years.”

His goal was to “capture the energy of what it is to be an adolescent at that stage, cut loose from real parenting and just allowed to do your own thing.”

“I think there’s too simple a brush that male adolescence is often painted with in which it’s just this destructive wildness and not much else,” says Cividino.

“But I think there are actually really complex relationships and power dynamics and intense feelings going on, and creative as well as destructive impulses, so I wanted to make something that actually got to the core of all of that and didn’t just paint it with one colour.”