We caught up with Film Independent Member and first-time feature director Gia Milani at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where everyone was battling Tropical Storm Gabrielle. She’d just come from Toronto, where she took home the Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award for her film All The Wrong Reasons, an ensemble drama starring the late Cory Monteith playing a store manager whose wife is suffering from PTSD. Gia told us she’d been nervous about having to deal with the press’s questions about Monteith—it was one of his final roles—but she felt they handled it well and were respectful. Here’s what else she said:

On being a first timer at TIFF

“I’d never been to TIFF before. What a whirlwind. I was shocked by the busyness of it all. I was so grateful my distributor had a publicist for me to point me where to go or I would have been lost. I thought it might be possible to catch a few films but they had me busy doing so much press that it wasn’t. The one film I saw was on the first night of the festival. They had The Big Chill cast, writers, and director for the 30th anniversary screening and it was amazing to see with an audience.”

On her award
“TIFF was a positive way to start my feature film career. I had fantastic programmers who really championed the film and gave it some legs. And how wonderful to top off the experience with the win. I had said that I wasn’t able to go to the party for my section, because I was doing press, and they phoned and said it might be a good idea to attend!”

Did she cry during her acceptance speech?
“I got teary when they were talking about the film before I went up on stage, because they really talked about the journey and how we got the film made. But I didn’t cry when I got to the stage.”

On the toughest part of the journey
“I live in a small town, and for a first-time director, it’s hard to prove yourself to attract funders and talent. It took a long time and those were some of the biggest hurdles to jump–they are for every first-time filmmaker. When I won an award for scriptwriting at Slamdance, it got the funders to notice. I’m a first-time feature writer too, so that gave it the boost it needed to get the script noticed and get people to take a chance on script. The cast was attracted to the script, too.”

On being a Member of Film Independent
“I’ve been a member of FIND since 2006 or 2007.  I live on the east coast of Canada, right beside Maine, and there’s no real film school there. I would fly down and rent a place in LA for a month, with some friends who write for TV, and I’d go to Directors Close-Up. It was on one of these trips that I wrote my film. I went to a lot of Film Independent events for living on the opposite coast! Because there isn’t a filmmaking community or mentors up where I live,  [the film world] could feel unreachable. Film Independent made it feel like it was within reach, that what I wanted was possible.”

By Pamela Miller / Website & Grants Manager