From Super 8 to Sundance, with a vital stop at Concordia along the way

The movie bug bit filmmaker and cinematographer Alfonso Maiorana, BA 87, early on.

At the age of seven, he was watching the films of legendary directors like Federico Fellini and François Truffaut with his mother.  At 11, he was visiting family in Italy for the first time and recording some of it on a Super 8 camera.

“I didn’t understand the concept of this being a job, but I clearly remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is all so cool,’” says Maiorana. “It was just so much fun.”

While his love of film and filmmaking was evident early on, it would take a flunked science exam at Montreal’s Dawson College and a transfer to Concordia’s Communication Studies program for Maiorana to truly see film as a viable career. But once he did, never looked back.

Over the past 35 years, Maiorana has worked on projects ranging from major Hollywood studio films such as X-Men: Dark Phoenix, to international co-productions like Barney’s Version, to network television series, including Jack Ryan.

Another notable project was the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, which he co-wrote, co-directed, and was the cinematographer on. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017, where Maiorana won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling.

It has been an “incredible” career so far, says Maiorana, but looking back, he says his Concordia days were “some of the best times of my life.”

A dream is born

Maiorana grew up in the far east-end of Montreal in Pointe-aux-Trembles. He was the son of Italian immigrants who instilled the value hard work early on.

His dad spent his entire career at Canadian International Paper in Montreal, where he mostly made beer boxes for Molson. He also co-founded and was the first president of a union for cardboard factory workers in Canada.  

So, when a young Maiorana expressed an interest in a career in the creative arts after high school, it made sense that his blue-collar father “freaked out,” as son puts it.

“There was actually a family intervention!” remembers Maiorana with a laugh.

To please his parents, he began studying science at Dawson College. It didn’t last long.

Two months in, he purposely failed a chemistry exam and showed up drunk in the office of a guidance counsellor with a vague dream of a career in film. She connected him with Bill Gilsdorf, chair of Concordia’s Department of Communication Studies at the time, and he found his calling.

“I absolutely loved that department right away,” says Maiorana.

Words of wisdom

It was the environment of the Communication Studies program that Maiorana loved the most.  “The teachers were just so open-minded and enthusiastic about teaching their classes,” he says.

“And the freedom was inspiring,” he adds. “They were aware that you weren’t an artist at 19 years old. Coming up with a film or a TV show or a sound project was all new, and the teachers knew not to break the dreams of those kids.”

Maiorana’s own dream was to become a director. But to get there he knew he had to follow in the footsteps of his favourite directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, who started out as cinematographers.

“For me, cinematography was the basis to becoming a director because to tell the story well, you need to know where to put the camera,” he says. “My favourite quote is from one of my favourite directors, Orson Welles, and it has inspired me from the beginning: ‘A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.’”

It’s an ethos that has served Maiorana well, and now, he increasingly finds himself in the director’s chair.

He currently has three documentaries on the go — Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen McIlwaine, Kamakakēhau: The Heart’s Desire, and The Kahea.

Goddess of Slide started a recent festival run in Canada, the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom, and has already received several awards. It will soon air on Documentary Channel.

Maiorana is also currently developing his first feature-length drama, The Last Trombone Player, a coming-of-age story inspired by his childhood.

“I think my style as a filmmaker is definitely a type of storytelling that allows you to feel emotion with dialogue and without dialogue,” he says.

“Today, we’re ravaged by content where every second somebody’s got to talk. To me, that’s not filmmaking.”

His advice to aspiring filmmakers trying to find their style is to not get discouraged.

“You need a dream in your mind of what you want to become, but if anyone says your film sucks or your cinematography sucks, well of course it does. You’re young. You’re only going to get better,” he says.

“But that’s why I loved the Department of Communication Studies — this is where you stumble, you get back up, you do it again.”