Halifax’s Ben Proudfoot credits storytelling roots for third Oscar nom in four years

Halifax-born filmmaker Ben Proudfoot says he wouldn’t be heading to the Oscars with his third nomination in four years if it weren’t for the conversations he had in the place he grew up.

“If you’ve ever spent any time in Nova Scotia, in the Maritimes, you know we love a good yarn,” the 33-year-old says on a video call from Los Angeles.

“The oral storytelling tradition in that part of Canada is very strong. If you look at my films, it’s all oral storytelling at the baseline. I think that comes from growing up talking to a cab driver, talking to a custodian at the school, and just getting the full story on whatever they wanted to tell me about.”

Proudfoot’s skill at pulling yarns earned him his first Oscar nod in 2020 for the short doc “A Concerto Is a Conversation” — which tracks co-director Kris Bowers’ lineage through his 91-year-old jazz pianist grandpa — and made him an Academy Award winner in 2022 for the short doc “The Queen of Basketball,” about the late basketball trailblazer Lusia (Lucy) Harris.

His latest film, “The Last Repair Shop,” also co-directed by L.A.’s Bowers, is set to compete in the best documentary short category at the L.A. awards bash on Sunday. 

“It’s not something that I ever expected would have come this early in my career,” Proudfoot says of his Oscars success.

If there’s a throughline in his films, it’s that they’re all “stories that are lifting up people who deserve more credit.”

In “The Last Repair Shop,” those people are the skilled technicians who work at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 64-year-old musical instrument repair workshop. It’s one of the last in the United States to offer free instruments, and free repairs, to students.

The film profiles four of the shop’s technicians, as well as a few of the tens of thousands of students whose lives have been enriched by their work. 

It faces competition from John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s “The Barber of Little Rock” and Sheila Nevins and Trish Adlesic’s “The ABCs of Book Banning.”

Also competing is S. Leo Chiang and Jean Tsien’s “Island In Between,” and Sean Wang and Sam Davis’ “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó.”

Last month, the LAUSD’s Education Foundation announced a $15 million capital campaign to invest in the future of the film’s repair shop, including a student apprenticeship program for aspiring instrument technicians.

The success of “The Last Repair Shop” has been like “an extended Christmas” for the technicians and students featured in the film, says Proudfoot.

“Everybody has a sparkle in their eye. I don’t think any of them ever thought this could have happened.”

The film starts with Porché Brinker, an 11-year-old violinist who tells the camera about various health problems in her family. 

“If I didn’t have my violin from school…I don’t know what I would do,” she says.

Proudfoot says Brinker will be his guest at the Oscars.

“It’s an incredibly crazy journey for these kids, but they’re loving it. It’s just such an exciting and hopeful and joyful thing in what can be a very dark and difficult world,” he says.

All four technicians featured in the film will join them on the red carpet.

“They’re friggin’ thrilled. They’re running around like, ‘What am I going to wear? Who’s going to do my hair? Will we see Bradley Cooper? Will we see Billie Eilish? Will we see Martin Scorsese?”

Proudfoot says that besides advocating for the importance of music education, he hopes his film instills in viewers the will to fix what is broken — whether that’s a mobile device or a relationship.

“Something profoundly moving to me is these are people who show up every day and fix things in a society where if your iPhone stops working, you get a new one,” says Proudfoot. 

“We don’t live in a world where things are repaired, and I think that it’s corrosive to our soul. We all have broken relationships, broken promises. Our world is full of broken things that need our attention.”

The technicians tell their life stories in the doc, with each sharing how music helped heal them from past traumas. Steve Bagmanyan, the shop’s general manager, says he learned to tune pianos in the United States after escaping ethnic persecution in Azerbaijan.

Proudfoot says it’s “just a gift from the documentary gods” that the technicians all happened to have poignant backstories. 

“But I was also genuinely curious about them, and when you’re genuinely curious about someone, they’re much more likely to reveal themselves to you, and tell you the truth,” he says. 

“We were lucky, but it also just goes to show that everybody has a good story if you’ve lived long enough on the planet.”

“The Last Repair Shop” streams in Canada on Disney Plus. The 96th Academy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, airs Sunday night on ABC and CTV.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 8, 2024.

Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press

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