TIFF 2024: The untold story of Roadkill, Bruce McDonalds Canadian classic, 35 years later [Video]

In 1988, producer Colin Brunton and first-time director Bruce McDonald wrote a letter to the Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC) requesting funding for a “cool” project envisioned as Canada’s first feature-length rock film. “We will pull this off,” they promised, “for the amazing once-in-a-lifetime price of $198,924.70.”

They even vowed it would be finished in time for the Festival of Festivals (the precursor to the Toronto International Film Festival) in September, 1989.

The black-and-white indie project would turn out to be Roadkill, about a woman (played by Valerie Buhagiar) tasked to find a Toronto punk band that had gone missing in Northern Ontario. A defining film in the Toronto New Wave movement and the movie that launched the career of maverick filmmaker McDonald, Roadkill was a defiantly self-aware Canadian feature.

“We were trying to mythologize our own landscape and to turn it into something cinematic, which we’d see Americans do so many times,” says screenwriter Don McKellar.

Initially financed by …