Canada’s history is as exciting as any in the world. Trouble is, it doesn’t get told very often. Canadian military history suffers the same fate.
A new action feature film is helping to change that. As exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster, and perhaps rather more accurate than some, Hyena Road offers a dramatic, thrilling, and too often tragic slice of the Canadian war experience in Afghanistan.
It opened in Canadian theatres this long Thanksgiving weekend starting on Friday (Oct 9)
Paul Gross is the writer- director, a main actor and the driving force behind Hyena Road
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It’s tough to make a Canadian war film for Canadian audiences. They’re used to seeing the huge American productions which swamp Canadian theatres.
Paul Gross made a first attempt at a feature war film with “Passchendaele”, a film about a Canadian experience in WWI, based in part on his own grandfather’s experience. The 2008 film was a bold, well-done effort, but did not achieve commercial success.
The materful new film built upon that early learning experience and is certainly the equal of any Hollywood effort, even though produced at about a tenth of the budget of an average Hollywood production,
In making the film with the Toronto firm Elevation Pictures Gross says he was inspired and extremely impressed by the Canadian troops he met in Afghanistan while there on a goodwill tour.
An ambush could happen out of thin air
He points out that this war was unlike any other previous war where the enemy wore identifiable uniforms and tended to be in front of you. This war he says, was a 360-degree war; the enemy could be anywhere and often impossible to identify. Death could come from anyside, from below, a mine, or above, a shooter on a rooftop.
“Everything is lethal, so wherever you’re walking, it might explode. An ambush could happen out of thin air”, he said, and this tension was brought out in the film.
First screened at the renowned Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) critics said it compared with films like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper with its intense drama.
Filmed in Afghanistan, Jordan and Canada, the result is indeed every bit as exciting and compelling as any US production, with dramatic and accurate fight scenes, cultural conflicts of understandings and misunderstandings, the confusion and sometimes futility of war and sometimes conflicting priorities of higher political ambition, and those of the soldiers in the field.
Shown an early version this summer former Canadian Lt.Gen Andrew Leslie, the retired Commander of Task Force Kabul, called the film, “A powerful and visceral look at modern warfare.”
Hyena Road trailer