Groundhog Prison

The number of short films that go into production with outside funding in place are few and far between. Such is the case with Same Crime Tomorrow, a futuristic prison thriller written by prolific Toronto-based actor, director and theater man Alexander Galant, set to shoot north of the border this fall with backing from Melbourne, Florida outfit Clear Channel Multimedia.


Galant was a Star Wars Fan Films finalist in 2009 with Blasted Behavior, a goof dropping some of the saga's iconic characters into anger management group therapy. His other films include The Missing Piece, which won a Silver Remi Award at the 2008 edition of Houston's WorldFest and the 2004 feature-length drama First Light.

The protagonist of Same Crime Tomorrow, Ethan, will find himself in prison for a crime he has no memory of having committed. Thanks to state-of-the-art virtual reality technology, this possibly innocent man is forced to relive the alleged crime over and over again each day, leading him to eventually plot his escape. Think of it as Groundhog Day meets The Shawshank Redemption.

When not toiling on his own projects, Galant has worked as a props person and art director on local Toronto shoots for U.S. productions such as the 2000 Dennis Quaid movie Frequency and the Showtime series Queer as Folk. He also has a thing for Dracula, having directed a short vampire video (Moonlight Desire) with Mickey Rooney as the voice of Dr. Van Helsing and staged a recent reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula the Un-Dead at Toronto's Bathurst Street Theatre.

[Alexander Galant]