Freestyle canoe competition mockumentary screens at Center Theatre

A viral video of a freestyle canoeist sent to him during the pandemic led Sam Dunning to write a mockumentary comedy movie script about a group of disparate competitors at a fictional national competition set on Moosehead Lake.

Originally intending the script to be something to entertain himself when much of the world was in quarantine, Dunning, who grew up in Brunswick and is now based in Brooklyn, ended up writing and making his directorial feature debut with “Canoe Dig It?” The independent film is being screened around Maine and beyond and will be showing at the Center Theatre in Dover-Foxcroft from May 10 to 14. 

Following graduation from Brunswick High School, Dunning studied filmmaking at New York University. He got into acting several years after graduation. His credits include starring in the movie “Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox” and appearing in the TV series “For All Mankind,”  “FBI” and “Blue Bloods”.

Speaking from his mother’s home in Brunswick while in the midst of the “Canoe Dig It?” screening tour, Dunning came up to visit her in March 2020.

“Something happened and I ended up staying for seven months,” he said.

During this time a friend sent Dunning a video of freestyle canoeist Marc Ornstein performing to Chris de Burgh’s song “The Lady in Red” during a 2007 competition. He was quickly taken with the clip and wondered why no one had ever explored freestyle canoeing in film. The activity is akin to interpretive dance or figure skating while paddling a canoe.

“I thought this kind of writes itself and a week later I started writing the script without any plan to make it, just to entertain myself,” Dunning said. He sent the script to a producer friend, who loved it and said they had to figure out a way to make the movie.

Dunning reached out to freestyle canoeists to learn what he could. By the 21st century the number of competitions around the country had dwindled, he said.

“Everybody can have a good idea but not everybody can go find the money,” he said about the process to bring a script to life. 

A few family friends liked the project and were willing to back most of it. Some funds were raised through Kickstarter. Other friends and local businesses contributed toward the $170,000-plus budget.

“It’s a good name, that’s all,” Dunning said about the setting on Maine’s largest lake. He had never been to Moosehead Lake himself. Shooting was done at Camp Agassiz on Thompson Lake in the Androscoggin County town of Poland instead of in Greenville. 

“It’s too far north and too remote to get a crew and cast all the way up there,” Dunning said.

“If and when this plays anywhere outside of Maine, Moosehead Lake is very memorable,” he said. “It just has everything going for it that a movie about Maine, if you are coming from elsewhere, would want.”

“Canoe Dig It?” filming took place in May and June 2023.

“Frankly we had a really easy shoot,” Dunning said. The crew was ready for problems such as rain, but they never had anything more than a light drizzle so production did not experience much of a delay.

“We only had three people fall in so it wasn’t so bad,” he said with a laugh.. “It was waist deep water so people could walk back in and we dried them off.”

Being a comedy, Dunning’s film had low stakes most of the time as the director gave the cast room to play and try different things and have fun with what they were doing.

The film is very much akin to Chrisopher Guest’s “Best in Show” and the “Documentary Now!” series on the Independent Film Channel, while also being a love letter to the state of Maine and canoeing culture. 

The biggest issue came during the near year of postproduction when all the material had to be sifted through.

“It’s a comedy. You can’t rush and you can’t let it out into the world if it’s not funny or if it’s wasting anyone’s time so we really, really dialed that in,” Dunning said. “We still had a ton of fun in the editing process because we were finding new jokes and things that we hadn’t even planned for in the script just there in the editing bay.”

Starring as the competition’s loathed frontrunner with a decade of dominance and directing a mockumentary, filming was “a bit more freewheeling than your average set so I didn’t really have a problem with it,” Dunning said. “If anything I think it was kind of nice to set the tone with my performance to let people know what kind of humor we were looking for.”

Each major character had a day when they filmed most of their dialogue and Dunning’s was on day one so he could immediately set the tone for the cast and crew.

“Halfway through the shoot it became more an annoyance that I had to go in front of the camera than anything else because I was having so much fun watching my actors work with each other and play with each other,” he said.

Actors had a script to follow and after several takes they were allowed to do what they wanted as they had gotten to know their characters. 

“More often than not that was the stuff we would keep,” Dunning said. “People surprised me with more fun ways they would say things or add new jokes that I hadn’t thought of. Freeing people up like that just opens more doors.”

“Canoe Dig It?” was screened last year at festivals outside of Maine and audiences responded positively despite not being as familiar with the hyperspecific characters and archetypes of Pine Tree State residents.

One character has his own subtitles for those unable to decipher his thick Maine accent.

“That was one of our happy accidents,” Dunning said with a chuckle. Questionnaires from a test screening in Brooklyn indicated most of the audience could not tell what the character was saying. 

“We realized this was an opportunity for a new joke to add subtitles to him,” he said. 

Dunning wrote out the dialogure.

“I thought wouldn’t it be funny if I overtranslate what he was saying and it sort of stopped exactly matching with the words coming out of his mouth,” he said, saying this detail is mostly noticed by those paying close attention.

“So we found another joke that wasn’t there to begin with,” Dunning said, mentioning the actor is from Maryland.

He hopes those coming to see “Canoe Dig It?” have a good time.

“There’s no message to it. I would say there’s no deeper meaning unless there’s one that you find for yourself in there,” Dunning said. “I think it’s just a good time and light romp. Really all I hope is that people come and enjoy their time with it and then want to see it again and hopefully want to spread the word and get other people to come see it.” 

Independent films live and die on word of mouth, Dunning said, with reviews and ratings on Letterboxd and IMDb.com being vital. Potential film distributors often look at the online comments when making decisions. 

“Most people don’t know how much power they have over deciding what gets out there and what they get to see,” Dunning said.

While he is in the midst of getting his film screened wherever he can, Dunning said he would love to write and direct again.

The director will attend opening night at the Center Theatre at 7 p.m. on Sunday, May 10. 

“I love seeing people react to the movie, I love being able to talk to people about the film afterwards and I don’t think anything spreads the word quite so effectively as me talking about my baby,” Dunning said.

The showings in Dover-Foxcroft will be the first for “Canoe Dig It?” over multiple days.