Fredericton filmmaker pulls inspiration from Bathurst winter landscape for latest short

Some people might dread a desolate New Brunswick winter, but a Fredericton filmmaker used the frozen landscape as inspiration for his latest release.

"My grandparents live up in Bathurst on the Baie-des-Chaleurs, and so every year visiting them growing up, if we were there in the winter, I would look out and see that the bay was frozen over," filmmaker Alex Vietinghoff said.

"And it would look like this, I guess, wasteland or desert of ice and snow as far as the eye can see."

That icy wasteland made the perfect setting for Vietinghoff's short film Tundra, which is on CBC Gem. 

The 16-minute film is set in 2053 and follows Sarah, played by Fredericton's Annick Blizzard, living in a post-apocalyptic world where the Earth has frozen over. Her mother, who raised her in this world, recently died and Sarah is left to survive the conditions alone.

The film, starring Fredericton actors Blizzard and John Ball, was nominated for and won several awards in the international film festival circuit. 

Vietinghoff, whose career includes work in marketing and journalism, including a stint at CBC News, wrote, directed, shot and edited the film. 

He said it was a lot of hats to wear, but having a supportive crew was the key to success.

The process of creating Tundra started a few years back. Vietinghoff wrote a rough draft of a script and tucked it away in his Google Drive for a couple of years. 

When a grant opportunity through the New Brunswick Film Co-Op came up, he figured it would be a way to get the ball rolling.

With an entirely New Brunswick cast and crew, the film was also shot in several places across the province.

"Luckily for me, there's a lot of abandoned buildings and structures in New Brunswick, and I've always thought that they looked really cool," said Vietinghoff.

For example, the Red Head Battery in Saint John serves as the outside of Sarah's bunker. 

And the old Smurfit-Stone mill in Bathurst is featured in a lot of the film's scene-setting shots. Vietinghoff said he's glad he included the mill's old silos, which are now demolished, because his film can now serve as a record of their existence.

Having grown up reading and watching a lot of fantasy and science fiction, Vietinghoff said he always thought the structures looked imposing, but interesting at the same time.

"The fact that there's years and years of graffiti and the weather's kind of chipped away at it … it's like a character of its own," he said.

"It just kind of helps with the world-building aspect."