Purple Toast

Purple Toast, the first feature film by Calgary's Brent Spiess, follows an Edmonton detective in his search for a missing woman, but it's no private- eye thriller.

"It's a film-maker's journey in search of his own voice or vision, that's true to the society he lives in," says Spiess, who made the picture on a rock-bottom budget of $40,000.

Featuring assertive soundtrack music by Calgary bands Enemy Mind Feel, Huevos Rancheros, Forbidden Dimension and Harmonic Destruction and with a cast of young, mostly Edmonton-based actors, Purple Toast is a conscious effort at truly indigenous Alberta cinema.

"For me, Purple Toast was a way of expressing some deeply held beliefs about art, society and provocative film-making," Spiess said.

"It's an auteur-driven film, and it goes beyond the literalness and superficiality of market-driven films."

The lead character Tom Struck (pronounced Strook), played by Callum Rennie, may be a detective but, more to the point, he's a man who - as the film's press notes have it - is "in search of something, he doesn't know what, until one day a beautiful woman walks into his psyche."

Struck's search takes him on a journey that leads to encounters with many strange characters. Purple Toast is a road movie, but it contains no conventional story with a beginning, middle and end.

Spiess, who edited the film himself, followed what he terms a "non-linear" premise because, in his view, our sense of reality - build on dreams, memories and visions - does not follow any kind of line, straight or curved.

"We consciously tried to be unsophisticated," he said.

"Something needed to be presented to jar people back to a different sensibility. The ultimate feeling we want to leave you with is that something has happened to you - something spiritual. We wanted to touch the audience on a different level."

Spiess, who was born in Hinton, studied anthropology at York University and followed up with Canadian studies at the University of Alberta before enrolling in the film program at SAIT.

Since then, he has directed corporate and music videos and short documentaries on native people in Alberta and cable TV in Canada, but Purple Toast - made possible by a Canada Council grant - represents his first "total involvement" in film-making.

The pictures that have most inspired him are Wim Wenders' 1987 Wings of Desire and Toronto film-maker Bruce McDonald's 1989 "rock'n'road movie" Roadkill, which proved to Spiess that it was possible to make a really inventive English-Canadian film.

"Quebec film-makers have been able to make more indigenous films and have been more successful with them," he said. "We've been more conservative, and after the 1940s, much of Western Canadian culture was lost."

Spiess is currently negotiating with the CBC to show Purple Toast in the Cinema Canada slot and has been talking with distributors in Britain, Europe and Japan.

"Purple Toast would appeal to Europeans because it's so Western Canadian," he said.

In the meantime, he has just finished writing a feature screenplay called Sweetgrass about a writer who meets a rootless European woman in a small Alberta town.

"It's a love story that has an existential feel to it," he said.