by MATTHEW HAYS

For Daniel Cross, the filmmaker and co-founder of the local production house EyeSteelFilm, his documentary passion began when he was an undergraduate film student at Concordia University.

There, in the late ’80s, Cross began to turn his camera on to the homeless population in downtown Montreal, people who lived and panhandled close to Concordia’s downtown campus. That film, The Street, turned into an epic journey for Cross—it didn’t get completed until 1997, almost a decade later—and became the stuff of Concordia film school legend.

Since then, Cross has continued to direct social-issue documentaries, as well as produce them, and has founded, along with Mila Aung-Thwin, EyeSteelFilm, the Montreal-based production house with a conscience. They produced the engaging docs S.P.I.T.: Squeegee Punks in Traffic (2002), in which a homeless man, Roach, was given a camera to reflect his own reality; Too Colourful for the League (2001), about black hockey players and the barriers they face, and Aung-Thwin’s Music for a Blue Train (an NFB co-production), about the motley crew of buskers in Montreal’s subway system.

This year will see the release of Up Your Yangtze, a documentary that has just finished shooting in China. The film’s director, Yung Chang, was inspired to embark on the project after taking a rather strange boat cruise along the river. “Chang saw the local farmers leaving due to flooding, and they really were left with nothing after that. Meanwhile, there’s this boat cruise going on, geared to tourists, where you can line up for the buffet.” Though there’s a lot of Chinese input in the film, Cross says it was made without the authorities knowing about it, given that they would not approve of such an unflattering portrait of China’s economic growth.

As well, the year will also see the release of Brett Gaylor’s meditation on copyright and contemporary music, Basement Tapes. And Cross is particularly proud of homelessnation.org, a Web site he helped to establish that allows homeless people from across Canada (1,600 and growing) to podcast, blog and discuss the various obstacles they face.

“Films that have social relevance, social urgency, those are the ones that really interest me,” he says.