Chris Deacon: Genie winner makes comedies.

Canada is not known for its comedy, at least not in filmmaking. That is, adds Chris Deacon, until recently: "I think there's a shift occurring in the Canadian film industry. As we begin to be taken seriously on the international scene, we can start to take ourselves a little less seriously and that includes widening the definition of what makes up the `Canadian experience.'"

Deacon cites her 1999 Genie Award for Best Dramatic Short for Moving Day as representative of this shift. After all, she was recognized for a film atypical of this country's most celebrated work. "[What] I found encouraging," she says, "was that a comedy was deemed worthy of the highest honour in Canadian film." The Genie win also had a more personal meaning for Deacon. In that endearing, somewhat self-effacing way, typical of her female protagonists, she explains. "I've always hesitated slightly when calling myself a director, because you never quite know when you become a director.... Well, winning the Genie did it for me. I finally felt like a bona fide director. I think it has something to do with peer recognition."

In Moving Day, Deacon focuses on a situation that's very familiar: that age-old question of whether to commit. Trouble is that her protagonist experiences this crisis on the day that she is moving in with her boyfriend. Added to the mix is a series of typical and not-so typical moving-day mishaps that push the real toward the surreal. The situations may be somewhat extreme, but Deacon exercises the right amount of restraint, presenting them in an understated way that enhances the hilarity.

Deacon's future will undoubtedly include more comedy and she is, of course, working on a feature-film script, two in fact. She muses reflectively that, "the two features I'm working on now happen to be comedies, but I hope to make a lot of films in my life and certainly they won't be as broadly comic as Moving Day. That said, even the most serious of stories always have room for a little humour!"