by SARAH ROWLAND

With the right make-up, Montreal can look just as glam and trashy as any city south of the border. When it comes to wooing Hollywood producers and all their U.S. dollars, this is obviously a good thing. But according to filmmaker Vanya Rose, there’s a downside to playing dress-up with Tinseltown.

“Montreal has become very invisible,” says the 33-year-old McGill grad. “It’s always shown as this abstract place where you can just plug in some American accents and pretend it’s somewhere else. And I think it’s sad because a lot of Montrealers don’t know a lot about their city and are starting to feel kind of detached from its history.”

She hopes to counteract this sense of lost lineage with Montreal Stories, a series of season-coded shorts in which Rose weaves historical detail into fictional stories about everyday life. The spring installment is 1912, an impressionistic black-and-white that takes place in the Old Port and in the Golden Mile. Representing summer is 1928, a dark comedy set on Mount Royal. The fall segment, 1945, takes place on lower St-Laurent in an antique shop run by a Jewish family at the end of the Second World War. The final chapter is 1971, an apologetic ode to Montreal’s brutal winters.

In addition to writing and directing Montreal Stories, Rose has several other projects in the works, including the film adaptation of an undisclosed American novel. But you can rest assured she won’t be staying true to the book’s original locale.

“I can’t imagine setting a story anywhere else except here,” she says. “I mean it’s like Woody Allen. What would he be without New York? I know he’s doing something in London now. But New York is so much a part of his art. And that’s how I feel about Montreal.”