When Jason Eisener wanted to screen the feature film he made as part of his screen arts studies at Nova Scotia Community College in 2003, he booked the Oxford Theatre in Halifax to show it. But there was a problem.
To show Fist of Death, which Eisener describes as a martial arts, zombie, post-apocalyptic movie, he’d need to get it classified.
The broke student borrowed roughly $100 from his parents to get the film reviewed by the Maritime Film Classification Board. Eisener spent only a couple of hundred dollars making Fist of Death, with the budget going toward the tapes the film was shot on and food colouring required to make fake blood.
“It felt like an accomplishment that me and my friends were able to actually make a movie that could get classified and someone thought it was crazy enough to give it an R rating,” said Eisener, now known as the filmmaker behind movies such as Hobo With a Shotgun and television shows such as Dark Side of the Ring.
The province recently announced that the government agency that determined how old you had to be to rent a film or watch it in a Nova Scotia theatre is shutting down. The Maritime Film Classification Board sometimes found itself at the centre of controversy over censorship and morality.
In a pre-internet world where one of the major forms of entertainment was renting a movie from a rental store, the board’s work dashed the hopes of many youngsters looking to rent something deemed not appropriate for their age — or they could just get their parents to rent it for them.
A sticker placed on the cover of the film included labels such as General (G), Parental Guidance (PG), Adult Accompaniment (AA) or Restricted (R).
Jennifer VanderBurgh, who teaches courses on film, television and media at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, called the shutdown of the board a sign of the times.
“I would argue … there’s less agency for parents to actually monitor what their children are watching because of children’s access to the internet,” she said. “You know, it seems kind of a quaint idea now that we would be able to restrict anything to people with internet access.”
The board’s origins date back more than a century in Nova Scotia, where its objective was film censorship. It wasn’t until the 1980s that its focus turned toward rating films, said Adam Grant, an official with Service Nova Scotia, the department that oversees the board.
He said in 1993, an agreement was signed among the Maritime provinces that would see Nova Scotia review the films and the other two provinces use the ratings.
At present, film distributors must pay $3.95 per minute to get a film classified in Nova Scotia. To review a DVD, the cost is a flat fee of $39.80 per film, said Grant.
The number of films the board reviews annually has decreased steadily over the years, said Grant. In 2015, 1,452 films were classified. Last year, it was 611.
The work of reviewing the films is sometimes done from a second-floor room at the province’s alcohol and gaming division office on Windmill Road in Dartmouth, N.S. At one time, films were watched using a 35-millimetre projector, but films today are watched on computers there.
Sometimes films are reviewed at the movie theatre in Dartmouth Crossing because of the format in which the films are provided, said Grant.
What it’s like classifying films
Randy Hume of East Chester, N.S., is one of the 10 people who review films for the province. He’s been doing it off and on for 14 years and said he’s going to miss the part-time gig that pays $50 for a half-day’s work.
“It is work, but it is fun … and I’ve met a lot of good people,” he told CBC News on a day that he watched the new Rami Malek movie, The Amateur.
Because the other reviewer wasn’t able to make it, Hume found himself inside a Cineplex Dartmouth Crossing theatre accompanied only by a security guard.
And if you’re imagining him doing it armed with some buttery popcorn, snacks and a beverage, think again. Hume said when they do film classifications at the movie theatre, it’s usually before the theatre is open for the day.
Hume said while watching the films, he pays attention to things such as language and violence and looks for “something that’s going to really jar people.”
How the film board will be replaced
In shutting down the film board, Nova Scotia will instead rely on the ratings provided by distributors.
“Our ratings are supposed to reflect our morals and our beliefs here in the Maritimes … but if we’re getting them from Hollywood or Toronto or wherever, this is not really going to reflect our morals at all, so we’re going to lose that,” said Hume.
He said with the distributors determining the ratings, he worries “they’re going to err on the side that makes them the most money.”
Once Nova Scotia shuts down its board, only three provinces will have them: B.C., Alberta and Quebec.
Hume said he can only remember one time when he voted to have a movie banned. It was an animated film.
“I don’t even remember the title, but it was just nasty, nasty visuals, nasty everything in it,” said Hume.
Highly publicized bans
Banned films — excluding pornography — have been rare.
A 1978 Supreme Court of Canada decision was made regarding Nova Scotia’s decision to ban Last Tango in Paris from theatres.
In 1997, Bastard out of Carolina was originally banned in Nova Scotia. Described by a Daily News reporter as a “no-holds-barred look at one girl’s tragic life growing up in the South Carolina home of a stepfather who beats and rapes her,” it was banned for going “beyond acceptable community standards,” according to a film board official at the time.
The decision attracted lots of criticism, even from the executive director of the Kids Help Foundation.
“I’m no film critic, but I can assure you this film does not overstate how children are affected by abuse,” said Heather Sproule in a Feb. 26, 1997, Daily News article. “It’s explicit and brutal, but no more brutal than what an abused child experiences.”
VanderBurgh said film is a powerful medium where what is being shown may appear as reality, but it is in fact manufactured.
“Films often show horrific things in an effort to rally support, to try to eradicate that horrific thing from society,” she said. “Those things are not necessarily endorsements of what they’re showing.”
The ban on Bastard out of Carolina was overturned in March 1997.
Other Maritime Film Classification Board controversies
The film board has mostly stayed out of the spotlight, but there are some notable exceptions.
In 2001, Hannibal, a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, was rated as Adult Accompaniment (AA), meaning children younger than 14 could see the film when accompanied by an adult. It had a stricter rating in most other places.
The film included scenes where “a man is fed to wild boars and his face is eaten off; in another, a man is hung from the side of a building with his intestines hanging out,” according to a Feb. 25, 2001, Daily News article.
A spokesperson for the film board cited commercial reasons as playing a role in not giving it a Restricted (R) rating.
“The film would lose out on a fair bit of the marketplace — that had a big bearing on the decision,” the spokesperson said in the article.
The board was also in the news in 1994 when it proposed that the cost to classify porn films would be $4 per minute, compared to $1.75 for non-porn films.
“It’s a subtle form of censorship,” the director of the Atlantic Film Festival said in an April 26, 1994, Daily News article. “In effect, the strategy is to keep pornography out of the province by making it difficult to get in.”
Even the cabinet minister responsible for the department seemed to agree.
“It [the classification fee] will create problems for films that shouldn’t be here, I’ll tell you,” Guy Brown told the Daily News.
Shutdown timeline
Grant said it will probably be another eight to 12 months before the Maritime Film Classification Board shuts down as the province develops regulations to make it happen.
Eisener, the Dartmouth filmmaker, said he loved the look of the stickers the board placed on films indicating their rating.
He said he didn’t realize the board was still in operation until the announcement it was shutting down.
“I guess I just never really saw the need for it,” he said from Los Angeles, where he’s working on future projects. “I really like the design of the stickers themselves and I thought those would make really cool designs for a T-shirt.”
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