Clean Ice

The legacy of a run-down hockey arena is at stake as peculiar events unfold.

Creative team

Starring: Ron VanDerSwaag, Robert Cormier
Writer/director: March Mercanti
Producers: Adam King, Salar Pashtoonyar, March Mercanti
Cinematographer: Jordan Kennington
Colour: Benjamin Wong
VFX: Adom Woods

Filmmaker’s statement

Having an older brother who played competitive hockey forced me to be around arenas in my early youth. I was always fascinated with them – the smells, the sounds and the strange architecture.

Clean Ice takes place at a 50-year old-hockey arena. However, the film does not explore the sport of hockey; rather, it explores the common Canadian landscape. This film experiments with the power of this landscape’s legacy and what legacy asks of us.

Legacy, by definition, is something that is handed down by a predecessor. The importance of legacy differs from generation to generation. Clean Ice explores this contrast but unwillingly concludes that legacy is inescapable.

About March Mercanti

As a young child, March would play with his action figures (and his sister’s Barbies) for countless hours because he was obsessed with telling stories … to himself. As a teenager he moved onto computer games like the SIMS to create his fictional worlds.

Eventually he attended Toronto Film School where he finally started telling stories to other people, one of those stories being his thesis short film which, apparently, a handful of people liked – it won a best director award. He has since made several short films that have screened across Canada and internationally.

He has learned that a key component to directing is convincing extremely talented people to work with you.