| Apr 16, 2014


(film to premiere on TVO next week)

Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham spent four years on a project that was sparked by a singular observation. Riding his motorcycle between Tweed and Perth one day, Neil Graham noticed the number of abandoned business on the stretch of Highway 7 between Kaladar and Sharbot Lake, and wondered how prosperity had passed this corner of Ontario by.

The two filmmakers took up residence in Henderson and began interviewing people who lived in the area about the businesses that were gone. They found Howard Gibbs, the owner of the last gas station on the stretch, and that was where The Lost Highway really began.

The resulting film is a quite intimate portrait of Howard Gibbs and his daughter Melanie, as well as the neighbours that Gibbs had never met, David Dashke and Linda Tremblay. The backdrop to the film is the economic and social realities of nearby Arden, which are captured in the film mainly through interviews with Sarah Hale of Arden Batik. The struggles and the fate of David Dashke and Howard Gibbs are the film's core.

Even though the events that dominate the film could not have been predicted in advance by the filmmakers, or the men themselves, Graham and Roemer do not consider that the story that unfolded before them was different from the one they expected to tell.

They say they did not have a pre-conceived notion of what the film was going to be. It was always their intention to talk to a lot of people and see what stories there were to tell. They filmed meetings of the Friends of Arden and interviewed people on camera about the region, its past and its future, but they never intended to make an educational or didactic film about economic conditions.

“The more you can condense a story the better it is,” said Derreck Roemer, “and in the end I think there is a balance to it. We gave it our absolute best to tell the story, and to try to be respectful of the people involved.”

Some of what happened during the filming came as a surprise to them and to the people they were filming, and some of those unplanned revelations became key to the story that the film ends up telling.

It is hard for me to evaluate The Lost Highway because the characters and their stories are known to me, so for me it was less a matter of an unexpected narrative being revealed as it was seeing how stories that I knew either through fact or rumour were told and meshed together.

However, I can say that the way the journeys that two people from totally different backgrounds were laid out, and the way the film deals with factors that were out of the filmmakers' control, was affecting.

Without giving too much away, the filmmakers had to handle the fact that Howard Gibbs' wife Hope had no interest in being interviewed on or off camera, and a similar thing happens in the story about David Dashke.

The vast difference in world view, lifestyle, background and life experience between Howard Gibbs and David Dashke is striking, and the difference between the 70-year-old disintegrating Gibbs Garage, and the seven-year-old dream of David Dashke and Linda Tremblay that is Nomad's Rest Bed and Breakfast is equally striking.

This only makes the parallels that the film draws between the fates of the two men unexpected, and at times, particularly poignant.

The way the film fits quite neatly together would not ring true if it had been done entirely though clever editing and film-making technique. There is some of that in the film, to be sure, but there is an honesty in the way the hopes and desperation of two men are portrayed.

They never meet in the film and they may never have even met outside of the film. After watching it, I wonder what they would have to say to each other, even though once upon a time, not too long ago, they shared a story along the Lost Highway.

The Arden Legion will be showing the Lost Highway on Wednesday April 23 at 9pm when it premieres on TVO. The showing will be preceded by a spaghetti supper at the Legion from 6:30 to 8:30 pm; the cost is a goodwill donation. The film will air again on TVO three hours later, at midnight April 23/24, on April 27 at 11pm, and on April 29 at 9pm. To see the trailer, visit www.thelosthighway.ca

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