Director Concedes ‘Midday Sun’ Is a Gamble

Not many people get a chance to spend $2.3 million of somebody else’s money.

Using the cash to direct an autobiographical feature film on location in Africa is an even less likely prospect for an under-40 Canadian woman.

Lulu Keating, combining a Day-Glo image with the intellectual complexity of a Taoist philosopher, got the job done with her first feature, “The Midday Sun.”

“I come from the tradition of film co-ops where we shot low-budget films on location,” the Nova Scotia-based Keating says. “You jiggle the script if needed to make it work.”

As both script writer and director, Keating spent four years chasing money for the project she still calls “my baby.”

When telling an anecdote, Keating often refers to herself in the third person as “the red-headed dame” who sits in the reception areas of banker’s offices until someone is forced to hear her pitch.

How she sold all this to backers as diverse as the Nova Scotia government and the First Choice pay-television channel will remain one of the mysteries of the motion picture industry.

Her film does not rove through the wide screen, it is tightly focused on individuals embedded in the landscape by the post-colonial value crisis still unresolved in Africa.

Just how “The Midday Sun” will play in Famous Players theaters after it finishes its Vancouver film festival run in October depends on whether mainstream movie audiences can tolerate a film about Africa that has few elephants, some ill-defined villainy and a heroine whose head is as empty as the Senate parking lot at midnight.

“In some way, I’m trying to fight against the American film tradition of black-and-white characters,” Keating says.