Documentary

Director: Jamie Kastner

Producers: Laura Kastner/Cave 7

 

THE GREAT CANADIAN HEALTH WAR is primarily a documentary charting the conflicting sides and current crisis facing both of Canada’s  health systems:. On one side, Medicare - Canada’s Universal Health Care program, which has for decades been a feather in Canada’s cap, and the more recent and increasingly used ‘Private’, for-profit’ sector.

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Director Jamie Kastner, whom I’ve collaborated with many times,  brings his characteristically provocative and playful approach to the otherwise serious subject by conceiving a world where a puppet plays Canada’s founder of Medicare - politician Tommy Douglas (1904 -1986 ), who is  ‘spinning in his grave’ at such a crisis. Tommy revives to assess the situation  in his subterranean ‘man-grave’, and it is this puppet-friendly world that needed to be created.

 

Having worked on the original FRAGGLE ROCK with Jim Henson, as well as having designed GROUNDLING MARSH, I knew what designing/shooting with puppets entailed.  With a unique but small spatial footprint and limited budget to match, I wanted to make the world fun and engaging, but also with a limited carbon footprint. We sculpted the surface of  repurposed flats with undulating folds of brown indoor-outdoor carpeting stapled in place. The carpet required very limited overspray which meant that at wrap, they were able to be sent for recycling, and for which we received a Certificate of Environmental Stewardship. The repurposed flats were returned to the supplier, to be used again.