Hot Doc Debut for Film Production Alumnus aims to bring up more questions than answers

We all lie to ourselves to a certain extent, filmmaker Matthew Bauckman said.

But what happens when you go from being a dreamer to completely living in a fantasy world,” asked the 29-year old New Brunswicker. This question is at the heart of Bauckman’s debut feature documentary Kung Fu Elliot, which is screening at the Toronto Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto.Kung Fu Elliot is a documentary chronicling the journey of Elliot Scott as he creates his low-budget karate epic, Blood Fight.

While his was in Film School, Bauckman said his father would send him clippings of articles with anything to do with filmmaking from is hometown newspaper.

He sent me a few articles about Elliot Scott, who had just made his first movie, They Killed My Cat,” Bauckman said. “I thought, ‘That is an amazing title.’ and it just stuck with me.”

Elliot Scott is a martial artist and passionate filmmaker who wanted to become Canada’s first action hero.

He was promoting himself like an award winning filmmaker who was making low budget movies that seemed really fun,” Bauckman said. “Just a low budget film maker trying to make it.”

Years later he ended up watching the trailer for They Killed My Cat and Bauckman said something didn’t match up.

“It was very low budget, bizarre editing,” Bauckman said. “It was really hard to get through.

So, when Bauckman and his partner for this film, fellow New Brunswicker Jaret Belliveau, settled on starting a project together, they decided to interview Elliot Scott in Nova Scotia, where he was living with his partner Linda Lum.

He seemed like a really passionate guy who was trying to make it big,” Bauckman said. “That really appealed to me.”

Bauckman thought this could be a story with heart and potentially be the Canadian Version of American Movie, a documentary about an aspiring filmmaker’s attempts to finance his dream project.

Kung Fu Elliot captures two years in the lives of a passionate amateur filmmaker, his partner Linda, and their cast who are all trying to realize their dreams.

The fact that he is a dreamer and he wants to become Canada’s first action hero, is the set up,” Bauckman said. “But what happened when we started talking to him was we realized there were a lot of inconsistencies in his story and there was something going on that we were trying to figure out.”

The pair made the film in an objective, cinema verité style with the vision to push documentary film back to the simple act of observation.

We set out to make a movie that would bring up more questions than answers,” Bauckman said. “And really the movie does get people discussing and sometimes even arguing about what is really going on with Elliot.”

Bauckman is originally from Riverview, New Brunswick. He graduated from the Toronto Film School’s Film Production Diploma Program in 2007.

Judging by his credits in the documentary Kung Fu Elliot (Bauckman and Belliveau were co-directors, writers, cinematographers, editors and producers), Bauckman is a Jack of all trades—something attributes largely to life experience and his alma mater, the Toronto Film School.

Bauckman said at school he had the opportunity to get his hands in all sorts of pots, from writing to directing, editing and even acting in short films.

>p>The thing I learned most from (Toronto) Film School was to set myself out and be inquisitive on my own,” Bauckman said. “It gave me the environment to go and learn what I needed to learn. It adjusted my brain to be self sufficient.”

Bauckman said the program covered everything a filmmaker could want— everything from documentary and short films to lighting.

I definitely learned all the nuts and bolts there,” Bauckman said.

The decision to attend the Toronto Film School was a big one for Bauckman.

I was really serious about filmmaking from a young age and I wanted to go to a good film school,” he said. “Toronto Film School has a good reputation so I decided to go there. It was a great experience, I loved it.”

It was a big move for the maritimer, to a big city where he didn’t know anyone at the time.

It was good life experience,” he said. “That was the biggest thing that (TFS) provided, having to work and film movies when I wasn’t attending classes, it was a lot of life in two years.

The film had its world premiere in Park City, Utah at the Slamdance film festival where it won the 2014 Grand Jury prize for Best Documentary.

Kung Fu Elliot screens at the Scotiabank Theatre on Wednesday, Apr 30 at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, May 1 at 3:30 p.m. and Friday, May 2 at 9:30 p.m.

For more information on Kung Fu Elliot, visit the film’s Facebook page.