World class or bust
Wherever you look, our rapidly expanding home turf leaves its mark on this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival
For the first time in its 36-year history, the Vancouver International Film Festival launches on Thursday (September 28) with a movie made and set right here in our hometown. It’s a major coup for writer-director Mina Shum, who sees her Chinatown-based drama Meditation Park receive the gala VIFF opening it deserves. It’s also a smart and timely move for the festival itself, a tacit acknowledgment that our city has never been the focus of so much of the world’s attention.
VIFF 2017 is asking us to look at how far Vancouver has come, for better or worse. Returning to work on Meditation Park with her director is Sandra Oh, now a Hollywood stalwart some 23 years after getting her first modest break in Shum’s Double Happiness. For both these artists, the contrast between then and now must be astonishing. Vancouver in the mid-’90s felt like a stalled city and a terminal underachiever. Now it’s a rapidly expanding sprawl built on the mother of all housing bubbles; an ever-shinier second home to visiting Hollywood stars attending an industry that broke its own records in 2017 (set to exceed $2.6 billion, according to Creative B.C.), while nourishing a thriving domestic scene of its own. It’s “the most livable city on the planet” with the poorest postal code in Canada, a desirable residence for global capital, and ground zero for the lethal opioid crisis. All these contradictions and growing pains are visible at VIFF, from the sweet New Age–y romanticism of director Jason James’s Entanglement, starring Georgia Straight cover model Thomas Middleditch (a Nelsonite now dividing his time between big-time L.A. and Silicon Valley, as it were), to Wayne Wapeemukwa’s poetic, if unflinching, DTES award winner, Luk’luk’i.
In fact, look at any of VIFF’S nine major programs—including, as we see in the following items, the international Panorama and Asianthemed Gateway streams—and you will find the signals and traces of Vancouver’s ever-morevisible contribution to the art of moving pictures, and the eyes of an ever-more-curious world looking back at us. In 2017, Vancouver is definitely a city on the edge of world cinema. DON’T GO INTO MAPLE RIDGE ALONE
2 Peter Ricq was dreaming about his first movie when the Georgia Straight interviewed his band, HUMANS, way back in 2010. Seven years later, Dead Shack arrives as one of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s best surprises, a selfaware horror-comedy that smuggles its modern sensibility into a lovingly retro splatter flick, like Superbad smashing into an Evil Dead universe. Thanks to Ricq’s assured guidance and a seriously talented cast—lauren Holly (Motive) is the film’s leathered-up killer, while an inspired Donavon Stinson (Call Me Fitz) as a stoner dad simply kills, period—dead Shack is relentless in its bid to entertain. Fans will trade quotes for years to come.
“I do art to entertain people. That’s my foremost goal; when I do paintings, music, or TV, I just want people to have fun,” Ricq tells the Straight, explaining that it took a number of overambitious false starts before he arrived at the idea for his Maple Ridge–shot debut (featuring “about 85 percent” practical effects, exploding heads included, horror geeks). “I watched the Fright Night remake and it just reminded me how much I liked those old horror movies from the ’80s,” he says. “‘Oh, yeah, I can actually make that for cheap! What the fuck am I doing trying to make these $80-million movies?’ ”
Of course, it isn’t like Ricq sat around for seven years not making a film. In 2016 he published his graphic novel Once Our Land, while HUMANS released its first album the year prior (and will perform its Dead Shack soundtrack at Fortune Sound Club on October 4, in the VIFF Live! series). Along with Dead Shack scripters Phil Ivanusic-vallee and Davila Leblanc, Ricq is also the creator of the award-winning animated series The League of Super Evil, and he’s a similarly decorated videomaker. With all that, and despite interest from L.A., he isn’t about to abandon his turf. “I’d have to start over,” he says. “And I don’t really feel the need to do that. There’s so much talent here.” > ADRIAN MACK Dead Shack screens at the Rio Theatre on September 29 and October 5. SHUT-UP POET OPENS UP
2 Few artists, in B.C. or anywhere, have exposed as much private pain as celebrated local spoken-word poet Shane Koyczan has. Through viral animated videos, magnetic live performances, TED Talks, even the libretto for the opera Stickboy, he’s shared some of his darkest secrets. Legions of followers know he grew up estranged from his parents, suffered unspeakable bullying, and struggled with severe depression due to all the abuse.
What’s so remarkable about Vancouver filmmaker Melanie Wood’s Shut Up and Say Something is that it reveals new shades of the icon’s personality. It also follows Koyczan on a new journey: the struggle to reunite with the father who abandoned him when he was a three-year-old.
“At some point the film had to decide: is it going to be a concert film or is it going to be a bigger life thing?” says the documentary veteran. “The biggest hurdle was getting the real personal story. He’s very eloquent but also very loath to talk about it himself.…to be candid, what surprised me was how socially awkward he can be. I, like everyone else, assumed he has his life together now.”
It helped that Koyczan’s story resonated so deeply with her own: “My dad married three times and I didn’t meet my mom till I was a teenager,” says Wood, who worked closely with Koyczan’s friend and collaborator Stuart Gillies on the project.
The mesmerizing concert footage and animated poetry sequences make it into the film. But it really centres around Koyczan’s decision to travel to the Yukon to meet with his estranged father. Koyczan himself states in the movie he never could have made the reconciliation without the film, and Wood admits he often needed pushing. The meeting culminates in a poem—one that still moves Wood to tears.
Along the way, Wood also captures all the ohso-human contradictions of the artist who became a hero after his “We Are More” performance at the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony. As the director puts it: “He is the good performer and he is the bon vivant; he’s the guy everyone loves and he’s the guy who thinks nobody loves him.” > JANET SMITH
Shut Up and Say Something screens at the Playhouse on October 4 and 8. THE CONTINENT OF VANCOUVEROS
2 Cinematographer Greg Middleton traces his
roots back to Vancouver’s small art-house film scene of the early ’90s. Today, he finds himself lensing the most successful TV series on the planet: Game of Thrones.
“I was an overnight success that took 20 years,” Middleton says with a laugh, back in his home base of Vancouver after flitting from Northern Ireland to Spain to shoot the epic HBO hit. “I pinched myself every time I went on set the last three years,” he adds, admitting he was a big fan before joining director Jeremy Podeswa and the rest of the team. “I describe working on it as both terrifying and super
exciting. You want to make sure you live up to the high bar that’s been set and do your best work possible.”
Middleton will relay some of his experiences—most recently, he and Podeswa shot both Season 7’s premiere and its Wall-crashing, bluefire-spitting finale—at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Creator Series talks. Among the highlights of the past few years on Thrones, he tells the Straight, has been shooting in the misty hills of Northern Ireland and at Seville’s spectacular 13th-century Alcázar (a.k.a. the Water Gardens of Dorne). Prepping for a shoot on the balcony, Middleton recalls being told they would have to get approval from the king of Spain himself. “He owns it,” Middleton marvels. “Usually when you’re shooting, it’s a homeowner or the manager of a factory you’re dealing with.”
Yes, it’s a surreal experience, with a punishing schedule that finds the crew shooting Thrones in blocks because of its far-flung locations. That kind of scale is a long way from 1996’s Kissed, fellow UBC film student Lynn Stopkewich’s necrophilia-themed breakout indie—the movie where Middleton started getting noticed. It drew the attention of Podeswa, who was looking for a cinematographer for his second film, The Five Senses. The rest has been a steady climb for Middleton, who’s left his visual signature on everything from TV series The Killing to Paul Gross’s Passchendaele.
A genuinely nice guy, Middleton has this basic advice for those dreaming of a similar path: “The best thing is to do the best work you can and always be the happiest person on the set.” > JANET SMITH Greg Middleton and Jeremy Podeswa join the Creator Talks series at the Vancity Theatre on September 30. DRAGONS, TIGERS, AND SUPERPIGS
East is East and West is West and 2
the twain have been meeting at VIFF’S Dragons and Tigers series for close to three decades. Actually, even further back than that. According to VIFF programming director Alan Franey, the festival has long highlighted Asian cinema in various ways, such as with the Eastern Horizons program in 1985. Franey hired programmer Tony Rayns in 1989 for a series entitled Cinema of the Pacific Rim that was rechristened Dragons and Tigers a few years later. Rayns retired after VIFF 2016, but Toronto-based programmer Shelly Kracier continues on.
The D&T series (now a part of the Gateway stream) has become a renowned launching pad for Asian talent. Case in point: South Korean director Bong Joon-ho has shown all of his films at VIFF, starting with his 2000 debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite. He went on to garner acclaim with 2006’s The Host, 2009’s Mother, and 2013’s Snowpiercer.
“Everybody knows Vancouver is really such an important festival for Asian filmmakers,” Bong told the Georgia Straight in 2010, explaining that he and others became famous at VIFF before going on to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Things have come full circle as Bong is being honoured this year at a special presentation of his Netflix hit Okja, which was partly shot here. Director Bong and Vancouver-based Method Studios visual-effects supervisor Erik-jan de Boer will be on hand to discuss the film. (Fun fact: the TV pilot of Snowpiercer is also being shot in Vancouver.)
Other major Asian auteurs who have shown their films in, appeared as part of, or served as a juror for the D&T series include China’s Jia Zhangke, Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Kong’s Ann Hui, South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, and Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda. The series reached a hysterical peak in 2014 when red-carpet appearances by J-pop stars Tsumabuki Satoshi and Kamenashi Kazuya drew screaming mobs of fans to the world premiere of the Japanese-canadian baseball drama The Vancouver Asahi.
This year’s program, comprising of 28 features and four shorts, has
even expanded to include films by western filmmakers, such as Robert H. Lieberman’s Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia and Sam Voutas’s King of Peking, proving that East and West are relative terms. > CRAIG TAKEUCHI Bong Joon-ho will appear at a special presentation of Okja at the Centre for Performing Arts on September 30. THE LUK’LUK’I ONES
Wayne Wapeemukwa is exhausted 2 from the “drinking, the networking, and the rushing around” that go with a visit to the Toronto International Film Festival, where his jaw-dropping debut, Luk’luk’i (pronounced “luck-lucky”) took this year’s award for best Canadian first feature. “I need to just relax!” pleads the filmmaker, reached a couple days later by the Straight. He also needs to put the win in perspective.
“It wasn’t a cakewalk in any way, shape, or form,” Wapeemukwa says, reporting that Luk’luk’i was met by Tiffsters with an equivalent degree of vitriol and charges of exploitation. (Grossly misconceived, in the Straight’s view; Wapeemukwa gamely insists: “It is indeed a conversation we should be having.”)
Surveying a day in the life of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the film uses mostly nonactors playing semifictionalized versions of themselves, including former sex worker Angel Gates, heroin addict Eric Buurman, and local celeb Angela Dawson, a.k.a. Ms. Rollergirl, whose story involves an altercation with a gang of hockey fans and her mistreatment by police. That was based in truth. “It actually inspired the activism and advocacy that she dedicated her life to,” Wapeemukwa explains. “Although it demonstrates the more quotidian ways that she’s discriminated against, this event is also a milestone in her life.”
That it’s set on the last day of the 2010 Winter Olympics adds a whopping polemical angle to Luk’luk’i. The Games, states Wapeemukwa, “continue the work of colonialism through the deployment of patriotism”. Luk’luk’i succeeds in its own countermission through the deployment of great compassion and its not inconsiderable charms as a narrative. There are horrors inside Luk’luk’i, to be sure, but there’s also humour, warmth, and deep wells of emotion. A gonzo karaoke version of Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose” provides one ecstatic high point, while another of the film’s leads is pursued for the entire movie by a UFO. In short: there’s nothing else quite like it, and little else that presents such a vitally honest portrait of Vancouver, not least of all—as Wapeemukwa replies when asked what he wants Luk’luk’i to tell the world about his hometown—“that it was founded on stolen land”. > ADRIAN MACK Luk’luk’i screens at the Rio Theatre on October 3 and 8. FROM RUSSIA WITH PRIDE 2 The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were like a magnifying glass focusing a beam of light on Russia’s anti–lgbt legislation. The international furor about this issue—which continues—has since waned, but local filmmaker Boris Ivanov puts Russia’s state of affairs in his crosshairs with his documentary On Putin’s Blacklist, which has its world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Ivanov, who lived in Moscow until he was 16 years old, said his film profiles several individuals caught within the “new cold war” between Russia and other parts of the world.
“The film primarily deals with LGBT rights and what’s happening in Russia with regard to that, and also international adoption, where there’s a ban on adopting Russian orphans internationally,” he tells the Straight. “They’ve banned any country that allows same-sex marriage from adopting Russian kids.”
Captured during three years’ worth of filming in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Belgium, Denmark, and Russia, the film includes footage of Russian adoptees living in Vancouver and the Vancouver Pride parade, situating local connections within a global context. What surprised him most was how far apprehension about Russian president Vladimir Putin extended.
“The strangest thing for me was when I wanted to interview people in the United States and they’d be afraid to talk to me because they think Putin is going to get them— and they’re Americans…but this fear is so spread everywhere,” he says.
Ivanov also praises Canada for welcoming LGBT immigration from Russia, noting that it’s much harder in Europe.
“There’s a lot more that the Canadian government can do, and it kind of mentions in the film about that as well,” he adds. “There’s a lot of very sad stories, but also being from North America, there are positive things we can do here to welcome these individuals who really have no other options.” > CRAIG TAKEUCHI On Putin’s Blacklist screens at the Cinematheque on October 7 and International Village on October 10. EAT YOURSELF FITTER
2 Hey foodie, that baby lettuce
sitting there on your plate was quite the leafy little agitator back in the day. As we learn in Mark Kitchell’s calorie-rich documentary Evolution of Organic, it was the “spring mix” that triggered the explosive growth of the organicfood movement from a hippiecentric and largely Californian revolt against big agriculture (considered “a communist conspiracy” in some quarters) into “a multibillion-dollar industry and the fastest-growing sector of the food business”.
As stated by Sibella Kraus, a forager at one time for Berkeley’s pioneering Chez Panisse restaurant: “The emergence of the foodie revolution started with organics.”
Joining Kraus among the film’s numerous (and tremendously engaging) talking heads is Salt Spring Island’s Michael Ableman, whose Vancouver-based Sole Food Street Farms (founded with Seann Dory) provides not only training and employment to DTES residents, but also a lot of the vegetables served by local clients like Savio Volpe.
Ableman was there at the dawn of organic farming, which the film traces way back to anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s theory of biodynamics, and then projects into the future with potentially revolutionary new (or ancient, depending on your perspective) technologies like permaculture and carbon farming. Paul Muller of California’s Full Belly Farm aspires to “an agriculture that also regenerates the human spirit”. Thanks to Ableman’s work, you can find that very thing happening right in Strathcona. > ADRIAN MACK Evolution of Organic screens at SFU on September 30 and October 1. A TOWN CALLED HOPE 2 A consistent and not unreasonable beef about B.C. film is that so much of it looks like a second-rate cousin to the Hollywood mainstream. A feature like Jamie M. Dagg’s beautifully paced Sweet Virginia is the exception that proves the rule. The Toronto-based filmmaker impressed with last year’s tight, Laos-set thriller River, and that promise is scaled up bigtime with Sweet Virginia. Where River was breakneck and insistent, Sweet Virginia takes its time to let the mood set in, appropriately for its tale of small-town lovers, losers, killers, and femmes fatals. When the superattenuated buzz of lowkey tension is broken by violence, it’s explosive and dirty.
A fabulous Jon Bernthal (Wind River) leads as a former rodeo star sidelined by serious injury and now running a motel in shitsville Alaska, a decent but broken man locked in an affair with a woman (Rosemarie Dewitt, La La Land) whose husband dies in a bizarre shooting massacre in the film’s opening scene. It gives nothing away to note Girls star Christopher Abbott’s mesmerizingly original performance as the low-rent hitman responsible, stuck in that hotel for the rest of the film, bugging out while he waits to get paid. He’s unreal, but everyone steps up here, including Imogen Poots, inside a melancholic neonoir that shuns Coen-esque flash and irony for a kind of ambient sadness, where everyone is haunted by cycles of violence and driven by deep emotional wounds, including a psychopath who yearns for connection on his own bizarre terms. It’s all choreographed by a filmmaker in decisive command of his craft, and with the suss to recognize downmarket Hope, B.C., as a terminal point in this outstanding film’s psychic geography. > ADRIAN MACK Sweet Virginia screens at International Village on September 29 and the Rio Theatre on October 1 and 7.