Beyond the Frame: 2025 Year in Review and What's Next for 2026
January 2026 NewsletterFrom the Producers’ ChairHello Reader, "The best shot is the one that makes you uncomfortable." 2025 was full of uncomfortable shots - both literally and metaphorically. The kind where you're not quite sure if you're brilliant or insane, but you know you can't play it safe anymore. That's where we lived most of last year. In the discomfort. In the space between "this is impossible" and "we're doing it anyway." The Stoics had it right: "The obstacle is the way." Turns out, every roadblock this year wasn't blocking the path - it was the path. Helena & Anthony 2025: A Year in MotionThis year we stayed busy. Here's what we were up to: La Caja Azul (The Blue Box) - We served as the Canadian Producers on this Spanish-language psychological thriller starring Luisana Lopilato and Gustavo Bassani, directed by Martin Hodara. Our role: coordinating the Canadian side of this international production, managing logistics and crew on a lean budget where every choice had to maximize impact. (Read the Variety coverage here.) Ruthless Bastards - Anthony served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, with Helena as 2nd Assistant Director on this gritty action-crime film directed by Bruce Fontaine. Pairing Sean Patrick Flanery and Casper Van Dien as two former hitmen forced back together for one last job, it hit screens this fall. Film Threat summed it up well: "Ruthless Bastards delivers exactly what it promises: two veteran action icons cutting loose in a crime, martial arts movie." Starwalker - We served as 1st Assistant Director and 2nd Assistant Director on Corey Payette's feature about a Two-Spirit Indigi-Queer performer finding identity in Vancouver's drag scene. The film premiered at Inside Out and was selected for the prestigious Borsos Competition for Best Canadian Feature at Whistler Film Festival. Pickled Rabbit is a short film that we produced, directed by Julie Zhu, that premiered at Fantasia Film Festival - nine minutes of horror about family obligation during Mid-Autumn Festival that proved genre audiences reward bold choices. Unfrayed, our western short, directed by Michelle Muldoon and produced by Habethy Films, traveled to Almería, Spain for a western festival, earning nominations and putting Michelle in conversation with filmmakers whose work she's admired for years. And 13 Miles, our 2021 triathlon drama, kept finding its people. Someone wrote after a screening: "I don't care about triathlons, but I care about not quitting." That's the whole game, isn't it? Nobody cares about the specific hill you're climbing. They care about whether you keep climbing when everything in you says "stop." P.S. Audience reviews matter! If you have seen the movie and have a review, there are a few places you can go to help the movie continue to get discovered. More reviews tell the digital algorithms to show the movie to more people! Here are some sights you can go to and leave honest (and hopefully positive) reviews:
The Week Canadian Content Grew UpThis past week felt like a turning point. Catherine O'Hara passed away on January 30th at 71 in Los Angeles. She represented a generation that had to leave - Second City Toronto to SCTV to Hollywood - because the infrastructure to support a Catherine O'Hara career didn't exist here in 1978. The question we should be asking: what's different now? The answer might lie in a show like Heated Rivalry. Jacob Tierney's adaptation of the hockey romance novel premiered on Crave with minimal marketing. Week one: 30 million streaming minutes. By the finale: 324 million. Now averaging 9 million viewers. 95 times average series demand globally - the highest peak for a Canadian show since Schitt's Creek. 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb's top 250. Second season already greenlit. Here's what matters: American studios told Tierney to "tone it down." He said no. He made it in Canada, uncompromised. And now the world is watching. Then Mark Carney showed up at CMPA Prime Time on January 29th - not just for a speech, but for a photo op in the "Canada Fleece" from Heated Rivalry with Hudson Williams. The Prime Minister treated this like a state occasion. Connect that to Carney's Davos speech on January 20th, where he declared that middle powers must stop "performing compliance" and start "living the truth." He said Canada would build new strategic partnerships and stop waiting for the world order we wished existed. Culture is geopolitics. What Carney's presence at Prime Time signals is that this government sees Canadian content as strategic infrastructure - not nice-to-have subsidies. Heated Rivalry is now diplomatic soft power. The runway for Canadian content is opening. The question isn't whether the train is leaving the station. It's whether independent Canadian producers can get on it. What's Next: The Quiet CanadiansThis is what we're building toward. The Quiet Canadians is a modern spy thriller. Canadian. Grounded. Real. Jim Bains is the kind of operative you'd never notice - trained to be invisible, the Quiet Canadian who shows up, does the impossible, and disappears. But when he and his team are marked for elimination, Bains has to do the one thing he's spent his career avoiding: become visible. It's espionage stripped of the tuxedos and Aston Martins. This is intelligence work as it actually exists - resourceful, unglamorous, and brutally effective. Think Jason Bourne's tradecraft meets the moral complexity of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with a distinctly Canadian flavour. Because here's what makes this different: Canada has always been there, working in the shadows of global intelligence. We're just quiet about it. While other countries build monuments to their spies, we stay invisible. That's not weakness. That's strategy. And it's a hell of a story that nobody's told properly on film. We're showcasing this country for what it actually is, not as a stand-in for somewhere else. Our love letter to Canada, built in the spirit of North by Northwest and The Fugitive. What 2025 Actually Taught UsOn scope: Small budgets don't mean small ambition. They mean maximum creativity with every choice. La Caja Azul proved we could deliver scope without compromising safety or story. That confidence is everything going forward. On sustainability: Feature filmmaking is a marathon, not a sprint. You can't red-line for months and expect to make good decisions. Rest isn't weakness. It's strategy. On community: Independent film lives and dies on people who show up. Funders who believe before the film exists. Festival programmers who take chances. Audiences who choose your short over the feature. That ecosystem is fragile and precious, and we don't take it for granted. On Canada: We're done apologizing for being Canadian. We're done shooting Toronto for New York or Vancouver for Seattle. This country is beautiful, complex, and capable of holding a sophisticated thriller without pretending to be somewhere else. The Quiet Canadians is us planting a flag and saying: this is worth showing the world. On failure: Every setup this year taught us something we couldn't have learned in film school. The financing that fell through. The schedule that imploded. On Obstacles: Every immigration delay, airline and postal strike, on top of the "typical" day-to-day curveballs and emergencies, forced us to adapt and grow. All of this made us better producers. Epictetus had it right: "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." Looking AheadOff The Lot Podcast / Back for Season 2Co-hosts Ken Kabatoff and Anthony Epp have launched Season 2 of Off The Lot this month. Ken's in production on his first feature (Remnant), and we'll be following both his journey and the continued progress of The Quiet Canadians in real time - the creative decisions, the setbacks, the small victories, and everything film school doesn't teach you. If you're interested in the unglamorous truth about making indie films work, check us out at offthelotpodcast.com . We're just filmmakers a few steps ahead who are willing to show our work - including the messy parts. Next MonthWe'll take you inside how we're approaching production for a cross-Canada shoot and what it actually takes to coordinate a traveling production across four provinces. For now, we're deep in funding, planning and building the right team. Making sure everyone understands the assignment before we roll cameras. We're focused on execution, sustainability, and making something we're proud of five years from now. Independent film doesn't exist without people who show up. Thank you for being one of them. Whether you funded a short, came to a screening, shared a post, or just read this far - you're part of why we can keep doing this. And that's not nothing. END CREDITS / "Pain is temporary. Pride is forever."This mantra from the Ironman world is true for making movies too: the hard part ends eventually. What you made, how you made it, and who you became in the process - that stays. 2026 is going to be uncomfortable. But that's the point, isn't it? The best shot is always the one that makes you uncomfortable. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and share this newsletter with friends! If you received this newsletter from a friend and would like to subscribe, click here. Remember, you can read our blog, follow our news, check out our films and get in touch on our website. Until next month ... stay inspired!
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