When people hear the name Adanac Films for the first time, they usually pause. Then someone gets it: Canada, backwards. That's correct. There's more to it than a reversal, and the fuller story is worth telling, because it reaches further into Canadian film history than we expected when we chose the name.
The Street
That Renamed Itself
Adanac Street runs east-west through the heart of East Vancouver's Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood, one block south of Hastings, cutting through the communities that have defined the east side of this city for over a century. It's also, notably, one of the few streets in Vancouver that runs straight through without jogging at Nanaimo, an unbroken line from the city's core toward the boundary.
The street wasn't always called Adanac. Until 1930, this stretch was Union Street. By the early twentieth century, Union Street east of Vernon Drive had developed a difficult reputation: bootlegging, vice, the kind of neighbourhood identity that makes the people living there want something to change. Not to leave. To rename.
In 1930, a local campaign succeeded in renaming the eastern stretch of Union Street (from Vernon Drive to Boundary Road) to Adanac: Canada spelled backwards. The Vancouver Heritage Foundation records that it was Union Street's reputation as a red-light and bootlegging district that prompted the change.
It wasn't an erasure. The neighbourhood didn't move. The people didn't leave. It was a reframing: same place, new name, a community asserting something about who it wanted to be, without pretending to be somewhere else.
That act of renaming stayed with us. There's something in it that resonates with documentary filmmaking. The idea that you can look at a familiar place from an unexpected angle and find a different story. Adanac is Canada reversed. Not denied, not replaced. Re-examined.
The Film Company
That Came First
We chose the name for the street and the neighbourhood. We didn't know, when we named the company, that there was already a Canadian film production company called Adanac, and that it predated both us and the street's renaming by over a decade.
In 1919, a Toronto film producer and promoter named George Brownridge formed a company called Adanac Productions and used the Trenton studios, the would-be "Hollywood North" of early twentieth century Canada, to complete and release two features, The Marriage Trap and Power. He then produced The Great Shadow, a feature about the dangers of Bolshevism, released in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike.
George Brownridge's Adanac Productions operated out of the Trenton studios, a complex built in 1917 that was briefly Canada's most ambitious attempt at a permanent film production facility. Brownridge had previously formed Canadian National Features Company in 1916, which collapsed before completing its films.
Adanac Productions completed what Canadian National Features could not: The Marriage Trap and Power, then The Great Shadow (1919), which received wide release across Canada and the United States. The CPR provided moral and material support; corporations gave employees free tickets to attend. It was sponsored film in the most direct sense: propaganda dressed as documentary.
Source: Greg Eamon, "The Origin of Motion Picture Production in Canada," canadianfilm.ca
Brownridge chose the name Adanac for nationalist reasons. Canada reversed was a flag of Canadian identity at a time when the country's screens were dominated by American product and the film industry was fighting for survival against a heavily consolidated Hollywood distribution system. The name carried a defiant patriotism: we are Canadian, and we will make Canadian films.
That 1919 Adanac Productions no longer exists. The Trenton studios eventually passed to the Ontario Government Motion Picture Bureau, and from there, history moved on. But the impulse behind the name hasn't entirely aged: a Canadian film company asserting its place in an industry that barely wanted to make room for it.
"Canada concentrated instead on the production of documentaries. Dependence on American capital and American products inhibited the development of the Canadian motion picture industry from the start."
Canada's early film industry, as documented in detail by historian Greg Eamon, was shaped almost entirely by the tension between a dominant American distribution system and a domestic industry that kept trying and being squeezed out. The sponsored documentary, not the feature, became the Canadian form. Government and corporate film commissions, the NFB, short films: these were the shapes that Canadian film took because they were the shapes that survived. That lineage runs directly into the work we make today: documentary, sponsored content, short film, community storytelling.
Adanac in the Timeline of Canadian Film
East Van, From the Beginning
East Vancouver has always been the side of the city that absorbed what the west side didn't want to deal with. From the 1880s onward it was the first home for non-British immigrants: Chinese, Italian, South Asian families navigating a colonial city that had assigned them to the margins. It was working-class by necessity, diverse by circumstance, and politically engaged out of survival.
The neighbourhoods we work in, Grandview-Woodland, Hastings-Sunrise, Mount Pleasant and Chinatown, carry centuries of that history in every renamed road and community still navigating what belonging means here. Our film A-Yi, directed by Martyna Czaplak and funded by CBC, is set in this specific East Vancouver: a Chinese can collector and a group of millennial roommates, an unlikely friendship across generations and cultures in the neighbourhood we live in.
The Prop Master's Dream, co-produced through Saltwater City Films, goes deeper into that history, into Chinatown itself, following Rosa Cheng's mission to revive Cantonese Opera in a neighbourhood that has been threatened, celebrated, and changed more than almost any other in the city. It's a film rooted in exactly the kind of cultural memory that East Vancouver has always been asked to hold on behalf of people the rest of the city didn't make room for.
Our partnership with Lantern Films, where our partner provides production management and line producing, extends that further, into Indigenous BC: land, language, and stories that colonial naming ignored entirely. Films like 10 Steps to Land Back and 'styel̓ép: Coming Full Circle are rooted in the same recognition that this coast has always been more complicated, more layered, and more alive than the official version allows.
Why the Name
Felt Right
We chose Adanac because it's local and specific and a little strange. Because it's the name of the street and the neighbourhood we work in. Because Canada backwards suggests something about looking at the familiar from an unexpected angle. That is what documentary film actually does.
We didn't know about George Brownridge's Adanac Productions when we named the company. Finding out, later, that a Canadian filmmaker had chosen the same word a century earlier, for similar reasons, standing in a domestic industry that kept getting squeezed out, felt less like coincidence and more like inheritance. The impulse behind the name turns out to be older than we thought.
The street was renamed to shed a reputation. The 1919 company used the name as a nationalist flag. We use it as a statement about place: being specifically, deliberately rooted in East Vancouver, making films about the communities that have always been here, looking at Canada from the inside out.
Same word. A century of different meanings. That feels about right for a documentary production company.
Adanac Films is based in East Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. The communities and stories we work within, Grandview-Woodland, Hastings-Sunrise, Chinatown and Mount Pleasant, sit on this land. We name this not as a formality but as a starting point.