& 
& January 14, 2013
SASKATOON FILM “THE SHAPE OF REX’” EARNS TORONTO ACTRA NOMINATION FOR LEAD ACTRESS
SASKATOON, Jan. 14, 2013 – Saskatoon film production company Factoria Films is delighted to announce that Vivien Endicott-Douglas, a lead actress in Factoria’s first feature film, The Shape of Rex, has been nominated for the ACTRA Toronto 2013 award for Outstanding Female Performance. Endicott-Douglas earned the nomination for her performance as Rose, a sixteen-year-old girl with a troubled past growing up in Saskatoon in the 1980s. She is one of five nominees selected for the award by a jury of performing peers in Toronto. ACTRA Toronto represents over 15,000 of Canada’s 22,000 performers.
Endicott-Douglas has been a professional actress since childhood. Her film and TV credits include Murdoch Mysteries, Rookie Blue, How Eunice Got Her Baby, The Line, Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving, Finn on the Fly, and Shoebox Zoo. Her recent theatre credits include Ajax por nobody, Forests, A Boy Called Newfoundland, and Hush. She is in her fourth year at the University of Toronto studying Social Equity, and Film and Drama Theory.
The Shape of Rex was shot in the summer and fall of 2011 in and around Saskatoon. Post-production was completed in September of 2012. The film was co-written, co-directed and co-produced over a four year span by Layne Coleman and William Hominuke. Born in North Battleford, Coleman is a well-known Saskatoon actor and former Artistic Director of Saskatoon’s 25th Street Theatre. Subsequently he served for ten years as the Artistic Director at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. Coleman and Hominuke, a Saskatoon resident and former Saskatoon lawyer, previously wrote two stage plays together: Queen’s Cowboy, and Conversations With Girls In Private Rooms, both produced by 25th Street Theatre in the 1980s. In its review of the Toronto production of Queen’s Cowboy, the Toronto Sun hailed it as “one of the best plays of the past ten years.” Hominuke and Coleman founded Factoria Films in 2010.
Robert Calder, Professor Emeritus of English (University of Saskatchewan), internationally-published author, and winner of the Canadian Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction said of the film, “Based on an intelligent, sensitive, carefully-nuanced script, The Shape of Rex offers a beautifully realized picture of people carrying the baggage of a traumatic past. Haunted by memories of an intense, unresolved youthful relationship twenty years into the past, Rose and Rex seem unable to prevent that past from destroying their present lives. Strong acting, particularly in the youthful scenes, shrewd directing, and skillful editing, give the film an almost painful authenticity.”
Author Barbara Gowdy, Man Booker nominee for The Romantic, three-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and nominee for both The Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, also had praise for the movie: “The Shape of Rex takes a fresh and unflinching but ultimately tender look at love and marriage in our age of social networking. As such, it asks important questions about loyalty, forgiveness, truth-telling and self-preservation. Some marvelously seductive performances—especially Brett Donahue as young Rex—lift the film far above others of its kind.”
With finely calibrated performances from an ensemble cast that includes Lorne Cardinal (Corner Gas), and the utilization of different colourization and camera styles in the alternating stories and time periods, The Shape of Rex reveals both its young lovers and their mature selves decimated by a notion of romance that Canadian society promotes yet castigates. By the movie's intense conclusion the souls of the lovers both young and old are stained by actions and consequences their consciences might scarcely be able to bear.
The Shape of Rex is an official Narrative Feature Film Selection at the 2013 Fargo Film Festival in March. Distribution is pending.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: theshapeofrex.com
