For the second episode of our new series, Canada's New Cinema, we were honoured to hang out with Hubert Davis. Hubert is best known for his short Academy Award nominated documentary Hardwood, that covers the complicated, but ultimately beautiful relationship between his father (a famous Harlem Globetrotter) and his mother. Since then Hubert's documentary lens has covered the troubled Regent Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto and the painstaking craft of a Canadian portrait artist--who got to paint the Queen herself.
We met up with Hubert at the beginning of pre-production for his first feature film, to talk about the differences between fiction and documentary, his work in the commercial world, and the help he's received from the government funded National Film Board of Canada--after we barged into their offices unannounced.