Jackie Torrens set to premiere her newest film at esteemed Hot Docs

With her long-awaited movie — ‘Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille’ — the Halifax filmmaker is eligible to win up to $25,000 at the festival

CITYnews halifax \ Steve Gow

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After a lengthy journey, Jackie Torrens is about to see her long-awaited feature film make its world premiere at the renowned Hot Docs International Film Festival in Toronto.

“It’s a great way to have the world premiere of our film,” notes the Halifax filmmaker about her documentary Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille — which will screen at the esteemed event on April 30.

“It’s the largest documentary film festival in North America, so I think it sets us up really nicely for our launch and for it getting out into the world for other festivals, and eventually airing on the documentary channel on CBC towards the end of the year.”

Premiering as part of the festival’s Canadian Spectrum program, Torrens says her primary goal during the event is to obtain a distributor for the movie outside of Canada.

In addition, she notes her feature film will be eligible for the Rogers Audience Award — an honour that is accompanied with a cash prize of up to $25,000.

“That would be nice — I mean, I don’t tend to lay in wait hoping for things like that so when they come, that’s wonderful,” says Torrens, who is also an award-winning actor and writer. “For me the opportunity to tell a story is where the real win is.”

For Torrens, that opportunity has been nearly a decade in the making.

An eclectic, captivating crime doc, Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille uses an array of devices to follow the film’s titular subject’s attempt to solve the mysterious death of his namesake grandfather — whose bizarre death occurred 15 years before Bernie was even born.

Following Langille’s obsessive investigation, which sees him tracking down forensic experts and family members, as well as trying to reassemble various scenarios, Torrens enlists the use of miniature sets to reconstruct the possibilities that lead to the demise of Langille’s grandfather.

“The miniatures work really well with this story because this is a story that Bernie grew up with — like a dark family fable,” says Torrens. “He never met his grandfather and it was a story that he inherited so, for me, the miniatures were wonderful in the sense of we couldn’t go back to 1968, but we could recreate it.”

While it sounds as if Torrens adopted the use of miniatures as way to tell the story, the origin of the film actually began with the filmmaker’s fascinating discovery of miniatures and their forensic history years prior.

In 2012, Torrens was producing a radio documentary on a group of miniaturists from around the globe that converge on Nova Scotia annually. Concurrently, she had been studying up on Frances Glessner Lee — an American socialite who became the known as the “godmother of forensic science”

After Glessner Lee was turned away from studying criminology in the early part of the 20^th century, she turned to using crafts to create crime scenes of actual cases taken from police reports and court records.

“Those dioramas became something called the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” adds Torrens. “Those dioramas that depict real life crime scenes are still used today to train police officers, (so) I was looking at her work, because you could get an overview of a crime scene when it’s done in miniature — you can get the big picture essentially.”

It would be four years later when Torrens would meet Langille after stumbling on a series of his messages on Twitter asking for assistance to solve the mystery.

Soon, she began work on what would become an award-winning short film version intended to drive interest and find backers for an eventual feature film — the one that is now finally making its debut at Hot Docs.

Although the movie will be premiering in Toronto, Torrens notes Nova Scotians will still get a chance to check out Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille when it makes its premiere.

“It is online so you can buy tickets to stream it, but also we are hoping that it will come play our hometown in the fall,” adds Torrens, who says the movie has been submitted to FIN Atlantic Film Festival. “And we’re trying to see if we can do something where we can have a place where we show some of these incredible sets that have been built.”

For more information on the film, visit the Hot Docs website.