End of an era: Board that classified films in the Maritimes fades to black

When Jason Eisener wanted to screen the feature film he made as part of his screen arts studies at Nova Scotia Community College in 2003, he booked the Oxford Theatre in Halifax to show it. But there was a problem.

To show Fist of Death, which Eisener describes as a martial arts, zombie, post-apocalyptic movie, he'd need to get it classified.

The broke student borrowed roughly $100 from his parents to get the film reviewed by the Maritime Film Classification Board. Eisener spent only a couple of hundred dollars making Fist of Death, with the budget going toward the tapes the film was shot on and food colouring required to make fake blood.

"It felt like an accomplishment that me and my friends were able to actually make a movie that could get classified and someone thought it was crazy enough to give it an R rating," said Eisener, now known as the filmmaker behind movies such as Hobo With a Shotgun and television shows such as Dark Side of the Ring.

The province recently announced that the government agency that determined how old you had to be to rent a film or watch it in a Nova Scotia theatre is shutting down. The Maritime Film Classification Board sometimes found itself at the centre of controversy over censorship and morality.

In a pre-internet world where one of the major forms of entertainment was renting a movie from a rental store, the board's work dashed the hopes of many youngsters looking to rent something deemed not appropriate for their age — or they could just get their parents to rent it for them.

A sticker placed on the cover of the film included labels such as General (G), Parental Guidance (PG), Adult Accompaniment (AA) or Restricted (R).

Jennifer VanderBurgh, who teaches courses on film, television and media at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, called the shutdown of the board a sign of the times.

"I would argue … there's less agency for parents to actually monitor what their children are watching because of children's access to the internet," she said. "You know, it seems kind of a quaint idea now that we would be able to restrict anything to people with internet access."

The board's origins date back more than a century in Nova Scotia, where its objective was film censorship. It wasn't until the 1980s that its focus turned toward rating films, said Adam Grant, an official with Service Nova Scotia, the department that oversees the board.

He said in 1993, an agreement was signed among the Maritime provinces that would see Nova Scotia review the films and the other two provinces use the ratings.

At present, film distributors must pay $3.95 per minute to get a film classified in Nova Scotia. To review a DVD, the cost is a flat fee of $39.80 per film, said Grant.

The number of films the board reviews annually has decreased steadily over the years, said Grant. In 2015, 1,452 films were classified. Last year, it was 611.

The work of reviewing the films is sometimes done from a second-floor room at the province's alcohol and gaming division office on Windmill Road in Dartmouth, N.S. At one time, films were watched using a 35-millimetre projector, but films today are watched on computers there.