One by one, the boyhood dreams of Adrian Halter BFA’10 are coming true. The award-winning filmmaker’s latest achievement is winning the Ruth Shaw Award (Best of Saskatchewan) at this year’s Yorkton International Film Festival for Flat Out Food. The TV series, produced by Halter’s media company, celebrates Saskatchewan food, farmers and chefs.

For as long as he can remember, award-winning filmmaker Adrian Halter loved to play pretend. A creative and industrious young redhead from the small town of Luseland, Saskatchewan (about two and half hours west of Saskatoon), Halter would spend hours making up stories in his head. As he looked out at the expansive prairie skyline just beyond his sleepy little community, he dreamed of one day bringing those stories to life.

“My mom had me when she was really young, so there wasn’t a lot of money growing up,” begins the 33-year-old director and producer behind the highly acclaimed Saskatchewan documentary series, Flat Out Food. “I spent a lot of time with my imagination as a kid because we didn’t have much. I got hand-me-downs from my mom’s two younger brothers. They were a few years older than me and really encouraged my stories. So did my grandmother who was really key to my upbringing. And my dad played a huge role in encouraging my artistic side.”

“I was a huge fan of YTV and, for some reason, I had this urge to make my own movie. I thought, ‘How hard can it be? I can do that!’ So I fleshed out this story about aliens turning cows purple. The only problem was, I didn’t have a camera,” he laughs.

Undaunted, Halter knew that if he was going to make his filmmaking dreams come true, he’d have to work hard for it. So the affable young man with the toothy grin started knocking on doors and putting up flyers at the age of 11, offering his own lawn mowing service. “By the time I was 14, I had saved enough money to buy my very first video camera. I remember being driven into Saskatoon and picking up this new JVC Super VHS camcorder – it was pretty high tech for the early 2000s. I paid $600 for it and it drained my bank account, but it was so worth it,” he recalls. “I still have it on a shelf.”

That single-minded focus and relentless determination has defined the filmmaker’s career ever since. Today, Halter is a sought-after director and producer at HalterMedia, which focuses on visually stunning and profoundly impactful documentaries, both in the corporate and independent realms. His series Flat Out Food was this year’s winner of the coveted 2021 Best of Saskatchewan Ruth Shaw Award at the Yorkton International Film Festival . The TV series, now in post-production for Season 2, celebrates unique ingredients and staple food sources grown and raised in Saskatchewan.

But Halter’s film career, and his successful collaboration with Flat Out Food host Jenn Sharp, almost didn’t happen.

Halter’s trajectory towards film success got off on the right foot, but had an interesting twist along the way. In high school, Halter brought his prized camcorder to parties, demonstrating a natural talent for documentary. With money in short supply, Halter knew the only way to make his dreams – including a two-week class trip to Europe – come true was to roll up his sleeves. He mowed lawns, worked in a chicken barn, bagged groceries, delivered newspapers and participated in class fundraisers like the annual chocolate bar blitz. “I was lucky because my mom worked in a restaurant and would put the chocolate bars up at the till. They usually sold out quickly,” he recalls. That grunt work and ingenuity allowed him to attend the class trip he knew his family couldn’t afford.

“I took my camcorder with me and made a documentary about the trip. I think that sealed my career right there and then,” he laughs. “I was a good student and people thought I might become an engineer, but I was singularly focused on going to film school. I did a work placement at a TV station and remember the teacher saying I needed a backup plan. I said, ‘No – this is what I’m going to do with my life.’”

While Halter shone in his small-town high school as a member of the hockey team and the class valedictorian, attending his first year of studies at the University of Regina was a culture shock. “There were all these students and I didn’t make friends quickly. It was so bad that I remember packing up everything after Thanksgiving and driving back home. As I wrestled with my thoughts on the drive, I decided I should probably go back.”

group shot of flat out food crew
Flat Out Food crew (left to right) Kaitlyn Schropp, Preston Kanak, tBone, Jenn Sharp, Adrian Halter, Adam Burwell and Joel Tabak.

It was a good decision. While Halter ended up missing about a week of school and two midterms, his return to university provided some new perspectives. “I started making friends and really got into campus life,” he smiles, noting he may have had his worst year academically, but it was a chance to learn some balance in his life after working since he was a boy.

“Getting into film school during my second year was so rewarding because I was with other students who felt exactly as I did about making movies. We all worked evenings and weekends crewing each other’s films.”

It was then that he met his future wife, Becky, who worked two jobs as well as attended full-time classes. “I admired her work ethic so much. She made me want to achieve even more because I wanted so badly to impress her,” he laughs.

Halter says he remembers a film class taught by Professor Sarah Abbott that really ignited his passion. “We got to pick our top three roles for this narrative film and I chose grip (lighting setup/camera support) and electrical. The script was about a young Indigenous woman and her Caucasian partner, and the moment of choice we face when the urge to be violent surfaces,” says Halter. “I was paired with Geoff Yates who was an active member of the local film industry. He was a fellow film school grad and very patient. I remember in school we used small ARRI light kits, and then we got to work with full grip/electrical trucks. I was blown away that they made lights that big. It was definitely a turning point in deciding to work in the industry once I graduated.”

One of his mentors, U of R professor and filmmaker Mark Wihak, says Halter showed promise as a student and has continued to impress throughout his career. “Halter is a really nice guy – he’s collegial and easy to get along with. In school, he always kept an open mind. He was curious and willing to try things. He’s built his own business from the ground up, and every year you can see it grow. That requires a lot of hard work, attention to detail and ambition,” Wihak says. “He also cheered for the Leafs, so he was clearly able to steel himself against difficulties and disappointments, and was ready for the long haul.”

Mark Wihak
Mark Wihak, a University of Regina professor and filmaker.

Former university professor Will Dixon, who taught Halter screenwriting, producing and production, chuckles at the Maple Leafs reference. As a long-suffering Leafs fan himself, he agrees Halter has the kind of personality that can see things through to the finish line, despite setbacks. “You simply could tell by his interest and inquisitiveness, his burgeoning talent and grasp of the TV medium, that he was going places.”

Will Dixon
Will Dixon, a former University of Regina professor who taught Halter screenwriting, producing and production.

Halter says Wihak and Dixon both inspired him to be a better filmmaker. He graduated with his BFA in Film Production in 2010 and incorporated his production company, HalterMedia, the following year.

Halter made a point of keeping in touch with Dixon, who, by that time, had left his teaching position to work for Rogers Media Inc. at Citytv in Regina as a program manager and production executive.  Dixon explains, “Halter would call me for coffee once a year to catch up and pick my brain to try out a few TV pitches.” One of those pitches included a non-scripted reality TV series about Maritime workers relocating to the Prairies and working in oil rig camps. That series never really got off the ground, but Dixon kept encouraging Halter not to give up. “His drive and persistence definitely made a difference in the long-term when his Flat Out Food series proposal came along.”

The crew (Adrian Halter, Kaitlyn Schropp, Joel Tabal,  Adam Burwell) creating Jordyn Burnouf’s Hero shot at Pemmican Lodge Photo by Preston Kanak)
The crew (Adrian Halter, Kaitlyn Schropp, Joel Tabal, Adam Burwell) creating Jordyn Burnouf’s Hero shot at Pemmican Lodge Photo by Preston Kanak)

Halter was eager to learn the business from the ground up and took advantage of every opportunity available. He worked on a number of TV shows at the Saskatchewan Soundstage during Regina’s film heyday; he was a set dresser for InSecurity, a series produced by Vérité Films, the company behind Corner Gas.

“I always thought I would hone my craft here, impress the right people, then move to Toronto. That was always my trajectory, but life has a way of making other plans. The local industry changed significantly after the tax credit was axed. Then my wife Becky and I had our first son in 2014, our second son in 2017, and our daughter in 2020. Suddenly making it big in Toronto was no longer a priority. What became more important to me was being able to be a good dad and a good husband.”

Halter decided to focus his creative energy on corporate and real estate videos, and lent his talents to a number of organizations. He served two years as vice-president on the board of SaskCulture and ran youth video workshops. One of those corporate projects was TV commercial content for the Canadian Western Agribition.

“At the time, Jenn Sharp was doing social media at Agribition as a former Leader-Post/StarPhoenix reporter, and we started talking,” Halter explains. “I was working on a story about a former financial worker from Vancouver who was blind and had moved to a cabin in rural Saskatchewan to create a refuge for former criminals and drug addicts. Jenn and I thought about collaborating and working together on this documentary, but the project fell through.”

Halter says he knew he and Sharp had great work chemistry, so the two started brainstorming how to turn her book, Flat Out Delicious: Your Definitive Guide to Saskatchewan’s Food Artisans, into a TV series. Sharp’s book takes readers from Saskatchewan’s southern grain fields to its northern boreal forests, and features interviews with small-scale farmers, city gardeners, beekeepers, ranchers, chefs and winemakers to tell the story of Saskatchewan’s unique food systems.

It was a match made in foodie heaven.

“I had started working on a pitch about unique foods from all over the world, but it focused primarily on the ingredients. Jenn’s book took a more holistic approach, focusing on the people who grew and sustained these ingredients, and it was based entirely in Saskatchewan. I could almost see the cinematic potential,” he enthuses. Halter made a pitch to Dixon at Citytv and received development money to create a demo reel and a production proposal.

“Everything was greenlit, and then the COVID-19 lockdown hit in March 2020,” Halter explains. “We had a pending application for money from CMF (the Canada Media Fund), but everything was in limbo. Our window for filming green grass was waning, so we decided to film anyway before fall and winter set in and our landscape changed. Thankfully, HalterMedia was able to access a federal loan from CEBA (Canada Emergency Business Account), which I then lent to the production to get things off the ground.”

Halter and Sharp proceeded to film that summer, along with cinematographer Adam Burwell, camera operator Preston Kanak, camera assistant Joel Tabak, field producer Rigel Smith, and production sound mixer tBone. The crew worked long hours capturing the diverse culinary experiences of “the land of the living skies,”’ showcasing field-to-plate stories about farmers, food artisans and chefs. With unique drone shots and plenty of golden-hour light, Flat Out Food looks and feels more like a National Geographic series than a food show.

“It’s Halter’s creative vision and attention to detail that’s made Flat Out Food the beautiful cinematic experience that it is,” says series host Sharp. “He not only has a creative eye, but he’s also an avid home cook and gardener who’s been watching food documentaries for years. I knew this series would be special. Halter’s always striving to put out the best quality work possible and it shows.”

Dixon couldn’t agree more. “Viewers have reacted so positively to the Saskatchewan subject matter and excellent production values. I believe it was our highest-rated new home-grown original documentary series we commissioned last year, and it was great to see the program recognized by the Yorkton Film Festival.”

After a successful first season, Halter and his team spent this past summer shooting Season 2, which is now in post-production. Halter says the company will never lose its commercial and corporate work, but definitely plans to grow its capacity for documentaries. “This year, we aired four hours of docs on TV. I hope to more than double that by 2024.”

While he still hasn’t made that movie about aliens creating purple cows from his childhood imagination, he has explored the unlimited possibilities of the delicacies Saskatchewan has to offer.

“I made the right decision to build my career at home,” he smiles. Viewers of Flat Out Food couldn’t agree more.

To watch Flat Out Food, go to www.citytv.com/show/flat-out-food.

About the Author

Lynette Piper is an award winning writer and filmmaker who is currently on a short hiatus from film school doing corporate communications. She is currently in post-production on her second film.

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Eman Bare always knew she wanted to be a journalist; she's been documenting experiences and telling stories for most of her life. As a child of immigrant parents, she translated the news from English into Somali for her father and later wrote her parents' emails. Now, at 29, Bare is looking back on years of professional reporting for news outlets such as CBC and Global National.

During those years, there were moments that some might call blips or distractions, things wildly outside what might be expected for a newly minted graduate beginning a career in investigative journalism. Bare has become a yoga instructor, created an ethical fashion line, ghostwritten for celebrities and will soon prepare to take the bar.

"I've just learned over the years that I need to stop listening to other people's ideas and thoughts on what I should do because, ultimately, it's never led me to where I want to be," says Bare.

Bare describes her upbringing as "the most bizarrely cookie-cutter immigrant story" - her father owned a convenience store in south Regina and she learned to work the till at a very young age - but what she recalls most is deciding to embrace the fact that, as a Black Muslim girl, she wasn't the norm.

When kids said her hair looked like spider legs, for Wacky Hair Day at school, Bare combed her hair into a full-on fro and put leaves and twigs in it. "A normal kid would have felt sad and upset, but I was like nope, this is my hair, this is what we're doing today," she says.

Bare was one of very few Black Muslim students at Islamic school and at Campbell Collegiate where she finished high school. She was the only player wearing hijab and tights on the Campbell girls' rugby team, but joining the team was worth it to make friends and have fun.

"I don't really look like somebody who would go around tackling people. It was a very unconventional sport for me to be playing so I just fully embraced it, absolutely loved it," she says.

Thinking about what it is that compels her to use her ability to tell stories to share the truth, Bare says it goes back to being that kid who was OK with not fitting in.

"It makes you feel crazy when all of these things are so wrong and people say, 'What can we do about it?' Well, we can actually just change it. We can decide that these are no longer systems that we want to work with."

Bare studied at the University of Regina's School of Journalism from 2013 to 2015. The school has a long history of guaranteeing its students paid internships, which often lead to employment. Bare's experience was no exception. She worked at Alberta Primetime, a current affairs show, and then Global Edmonton, which hired her a few days after she started.

Drawn to investigative reporting, she continued to work with Global for her last year of journalism school. After she graduated, she moved to Toronto to work on 16X9, a national Global News investigative program. Bare returned home to cover local news and investigative stories for CBC Saskatchewan, then moved back to Toronto in 2017 to work for CBC News Network, the iUnit (now CBC Investigates) and Power & Politics as an associate producer and reporter.

Mitch Diamantopoulos, associate professor at the School of Journalism, taught a class called "Journalism Topics" that provides undergraduates with space to discuss sensitive issues - gender discrimination in the workplace, reporting on race and class - before they encounter them in the field. He says Bare was often the first student to enter discussions and one he didn't have to prod to ask the right questions.

Mitch Diamantopoulos, associate professor at the School of Journalism. Mitch Diamantopoulos, associate professor at the School of Journalism.

"You want a journalist who is fearless and who risks not winning a popularity contest to get to the truth. It was pretty obvious, early on, that Eman had a lot of investigative zeal. I thought she was either going to end up in jail or win a Pulitzer," he laughs.

While in journalism school, Bare won the CTV Investigative Journalism Prize, given to the student who completes the best investigative work while in school.

Since then, a pattern has emerged in Bare's journalistic work. She doesn't shy away from stories that highlight systemic injustice. Most recently, she's covered stories on Black identity in Toronto, racial slurs allegedly used by a teacher at an Ontario school, negligent care in Regina's General Hospital and Saskatchewan's drinking and driving culture.

Bare's motivation comes from her Islamic faith, which she engaged with more intentionally at 18 when she trained to become a yoga instructor. Verse 135 from Surah An-Nisa, the fourth chapter of the Qur'an which translates to "The Women," is one she says she kept in mind particularly during journalism school.

"It talks about how, for people who have faith, to stand firmly for justice even if it's against your character, relatives or yourself," she says. "God is always on the side of the truthtellers."

It may seem unusual to hear a journalist acknowledge their faith as their inspiration, but to Diamantopoulos it makes sense.

"The quest for justice, which is so important to so many people of faith, is also at the core of journalism," he says. "Journalism is not simply about the truth… it's about the truth to empower the public to make their lives better, to improve the world."

But while driven to tell the truth, Bare learned early on how rough a reporter's life can be. Working long hours for Global in Toronto, and under constant pressure to deliver stories in a city she didn't know well, took its toll. She soon became overwhelmed and decided to do what any overworked reporter would do: enroll in a fashion design program at Toronto Film School.

"My internal compass felt off. I didn't have the excitement and passion to be doing stories. I couldn't meet people because I was constantly in this newsroom. I thought doing something creative would bring joy back into my life," she says.

Ever since she was young, Bare has taken charge of the way she looks. While she wore hijab and was more covered up than other girls in high school, she wanted to look like a regular kid. So she improvised by wearing her father's dress shirts and cinching them with a belt, mastering a comfortable, feminine look that she says felt good.

"I wasn't going to be wearing Silver jeans, Ugg boots and a North Face coat," she laughs.

Honing her sewing skills and pattern design, Bare came out of the one-year fashion program with a vision: creating an ethical clothing line for Muslim women that supports the women making the garments. In a whirlwind two years that saw her return to Regina to work for CBC Saskatchewan and then return to Toronto, she designed a line of accessories, which she morphed into a full collection that debuted at Saskatchewan Fashion Week in 2017. A year and a half later she showcased her collection, "Al-Nisa," at New York Fashion Week in 2018.

"Her pieces seem to have this timeless classic-ness to them," says Rachel Mielke, founder and CEO of Regina-based jewellery company Hillberg & Berk, which sponsored and provided jewellery for Bare's collection at the New York showcase.

Rachel Mielke, founder and CEO of Regina-based jewellery company Hillberg & Berk. Rachel Mielke, founder and CEO of Regina-based jewellery company Hillberg & Berk.

"It's product that you can easily wear everyday but still makes a statement with simple silhouettes, beautiful fabrics and cuts to her designs," she says.

Along with bold fashion statements, Bare's work addresses issues faced by women in the Global South and immigrant women closer to home. Bare's own mother, who worked as a nurse's aide, would bring Bare with her to work because she couldn't afford childcare. Her employers were understanding, and Bare wants to pass that empathy forward in her work.

"I wanted to create a space where women could work and wouldn't have to choose between being mothers and financially providing for their kids," she says.

A woman named Asima, who left three of her children behind with family in Myanmar to pursue work at a women's collective in Malaysia, has made turbans for Bare's line. Now on to her second collection, Bare has also employed women from Morocco, Bangladesh and Turkey, striving to create safe and supportive working conditions for them.

 

She says it's important to be out in the world in order to build community trust. That's where good stories come from. "You build understanding and you start seeing things from a different lens and a different perspective," she says. "You start asking different questions."

"She has incredibly audacious goals and dreams and she just makes it happen. She's an incredible model for women," says Mielke.

Bare was also the only designer to use all Black models at New York Fashion Week, which she says forced the company that hired the hair and make-up team to make sure they had someone who knew how to style Black hair.

"The vision behind it for me was, yes, the representation when the women walk on the stage, but also what was happening backstage," she says.

Bare has no qualms about holding power to account as a journalist. After all, the phrase "Question Authority" is on notepads and magnets that J-School students receive their first week at the University of Regina. But she has experienced her share of frustration with power dynamics within news organizations.

As a minority reporter, she has felt under-resourced compared to her colleagues. "The problem isn't getting minority or marginalized journalists into newsrooms, it's investing in them once they're there," she says. "I've never been someone who has come out there to say 'I want to be a hijabi reporter.' I just wanted to be a really good journalist."

Bare's course of action when faced with adversity isn't to give up, it's to get better. Feeling the need for change once again, Bare applied to law school, not to become a lawyer, but to become a better storyteller.

"To be a good journalist, you have to constantly be learning," she says. "The more you know, the more nuanced, powerful stories you're able to tell. Because I wanted to do investigative journalism, law school made sense, in my weird brain it makes sense," she laughs.

After the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, an act that sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter mobilization and protests across the continent, Bare worked as a student attorney on Carr v. De Blasio with Alvin Bragg, her criminal procedure professor and former Chief Deputy Attorney General of New York State. The case was connected to the death of Eric Garner, a Black man killed in 2014 by a white NYPD police officer who wasn't let go from his position until 2019.

Eman Bare

"Reading all the documents and watching the police outwardly lie, it affects your faith in people," she says. "You just realize you're working with people with a completely different moral compass than you. I've always thought, 'People just don't know.' It's actually not that. People just don't care sometimes. They see things very differently than you."

As disheartening as that realization is, it's led Bare to think strategically about her storytelling and her audience.

"Am I going to focus on the devastation of police brutality on Black communities or on how much over-policing costs taxpayers? When you realize certain communities respond more aggressively to their bottom line than the death of an innocent man, it's jarring, but you realize you need to cater to your audience and pursue the truth."

This coming year, Bare will keep the many plates she has in the air spinning and see where they take her. Currently ghostwriting books and speeches for celebrities, she travels to Turkey this fall to meet the women who make some of her clothes and to study for her bar exam. Whether or not Bare returns to the newsroom, her hunt for stories will continue.

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