Watching Love and Other Dilemmas, it is clear that screenwriter Deborah Peraya, right, was influenced not only by the classic movies she watched growing up but also by the zaniness of her Jewish family.
Peraya’s Russian grandparents, Sarah and Abe Bialogowsky, came to Vancouver after the war. Peraya, 37, still lives in Vancouver. Her mother, Fay, was born in a refugee camp in Germany and delivered by an ex-Nazi doctor.
“My grandmother was larger than life,” Peraya said. “She was also very superstitious, and I think that came out of growing up in Communist Russia. I was raised with all these superstitions like you never tell anyone what plane you are going on or you never kiss anyone goodbye in a doorway.”
Love and Other Dilemmas, Peraya’s first film, is about Ginger Shapiro’s wedding day. She’s nine months pregnant, and she’s been robbed, kidnapped, thinks her fiancé is dead and has until 5 p.m. to get married and break her family curse.
“It wasn’t autobiographical, but I think the underlying themes came out of autobiographical issues that were going on for me at the time,” Peraya says. “I was actually pregnant when I wrote this feature.” Her daughter, Chiara, is now 6.
Peraya makes her living writing screenplays and scripts for television shows, including CTV’s Robson Arms.
Many of the characters in Love and Other Dilemmas are Jewish. Directed by Peraya’s husband, Loreto Di Stefano, 38, the film’s cast includes Gabrielle Miller, John Cassini, Stephen Lobo, Fred Ewanuick and Janet Wright.
“I wrote for Robson Arms on season one. I had seen Gabe (Miller) and Fred (Ewanuick) on set. We wanted to have a read-through so I could hear how the draft sounded, and we asked Gabe to be Ginger,” Peraya says. “As soon as we heard her, it was never a question after that point that Gabrielle was Ginger for us. Fred was so brilliantly funny – he plays Emmett, the guy who kidnaps Ginger on her wedding night.”
Peraya wanted her film to have a screwball sensibility, reminiscent of the classic comedies she had watched with her family. It was also important to her that the couple in her film be Jewish because in the movies she saw as a child everybody got married in churches, and that wasn’t the reality of the weddings she went to. She wondered why a couple in a movie couldn’t get married in a synagogue, as they do in her film.
“I think for me, it [her film] had to come from a truth I knew,” Peraya says.
She adds that she doesn’t like cruel comedy, which she avoids. “I don’t think comedy needs to poke fun at people – it can poke fun at situations and problems. I think it is much more fun if we can laugh because we recognize those things in our own cultures and our own lives. I’m always aware of that when I’m writing. I’m not malicious in the comedy.”
Peraya and Di Stefano married 10 years ago on April Fool’s Day. This is Di Stefano’s first directing effort. He usually works in film post-production and was involved in the post-production of Chocolat, whose cast included Johnny Depp.
“Working with my husband was really fun. Our skills are very different, he’s a director – a far more visual person than I am – and the ways in which we challenge each other are actually complementary. Most of the time it was great,” Peraya says.
Love and Other Dilemmas premièred at the Vancouver Film Festival in October 2006 and is opening in selected Canadian cities on Feb. 1.