| Dec 01, 2011


According to Derreck Roemer, the Lost Highway project had its impetus when his filmmaking partner Neil Graham, who was riding his motorcycle on the stretch of Highway 7 from Peterborough to Ottawa, noticed that once he passed the Tweed turnoff there was very little at the side of the road except some empty shells of former restaurants, motels and gas stations.

Neil Graham knew the local area somewhat, being related to the former owner of what was then the Saylor's Inn near Arden, and the filmmakers wondered if there was a story in the question of what happened to cause this pocket of Eastern Ontario to fall on hard times when it is located in the vicinity of the growth that has characterized southern Ontario for years and years.

“There was an article in the Guardian newspaper (Guardian.co.uk) about a woman living in an old gas station on Route 66 in the United States. Neil sent it to me and said, 'look at this woman'. It made me wonder who we would find by knocking on doors on Highway 7 between Kaladar and Perth,” Derreck Roemer said in a phone interview last week.

The project was kick-started in 2009 when Roemer and Graham interviewed former Reeve and Frontenac County Warden Howard Gibbs at his now closed garage between Arden and Mountain Grove, and Insurgent Productions, Roemer and Graham's production company, recently received funding from TVO to produce an hour-long documentary by the end of 2012 for airing in 2013.

The project also includes a web site and a web forum to collect materials about the Arden region.

“As the project has developed we realized the original idea of looking at the highway between Kaladar and Perth was too broad and we have focused in on Arden,” Roemer said.

One of the elements that has piqued Insurgent Productions’ interest has been the Arden rejuvenation project through the ongoing Friends of Arden project.

The two-man film crew showed up at a meeting of Central Frontenac Council on Tuesday, November 22 to film David Dashke and Terry Kennedy from the 'Friends' as they presented an update of recent activities and future plans.

Don Amos and Maribeth Scott from Northern Frontenac Community Services (NFCS) were also a delegation at that council meeting. They presented an update of the NFCS Youth program and Neil Graham quickly turned his camera on them.

“We heard from people in Arden that all the young people are leaving the area as soon as they can and here were people who were trying to give them a reason to stay, so we ended up meeting with Don Amos the next day,” Derreck Roemer said.

At this point the shape of the Lost Highway film is evolving, according to Dereck Roemer. The plan is to structure the film around four or so individual stories, and the filmmakers are casting about for those four stories.

“We are hoping to find a young person to profile, which is what interested us about the youth program,” he said.

To learn more about the local region, Insurgent Projects has rented a house on the Henderson Road, which will serve as a base. They will be there for about a week at a time periodically throughout the next six months or so to get a feel for the local community in the different seasons.

Whether the film ends up delivering a hopeful message about Arden, a forlorn one, or some combination of the two is not yet clear, even to the filmmakers.

“We aren't coming in with a fixed message. We want to look at rural life, the issues that people face here,” he said.

Roemer and Graham made a movie about the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto a few years ago. The Gemini award-winning documentary was about the renovations to what had been a rundown hotel in the Parkdale region of Toronto. It ended up portraying in some detail the lives of the people who had been living in the hotel and were displaced as it was modernized.

It will be interesting to see how the lives of Ardenites are portrayed in “Lost Highway”.

For more information visit: thelosthighway.ca/the-film

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