Brandon Yan moves on up inside Out on Screen MOVIE NOTES Vancouver critics hail Reformed Paul Schrader
Craig Takeuchi
On December 17, Out on Screen, which runs the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and the Out in Schools program, announced that education director Brandon Yan has been appointed to the newly created position of deputy executive director.
Yan will be responsible for leading the operations of the nonprofit organization and will work with executive director Stephanie Goodwin to develop its impact and reach. Goodwin told the Georgia Straight that the new position “reflects an emphasis on higher-level external engagement”.
“It’s to create extra capacity so he and I can effectively engage governments, stakeholders, and wider LGBT2Q communities,” she explained.
As education director for the past two years, Yan helped double the reach of the Out in Schools program across British Columbia by expanding from 10,000 students to an expected 25,000 in 2018. The program screens Lgbt–related films and facilitates workshops and discussions about safe spaces, discrimination, and sexualorientation and gender-identity issues in schools across the province.
Yan, who has been with Out on Screen for four years, also ran as a Onecity candidate for city council in the 2018 municipal election.
Meanwhile, Out in Schools program manager Gavin K. Somers will take over Yan’s former position.
Submissions for the 2019 Vancouver Queer Film Festival, which will run from August 15 to 25, are currently being accepted, with an earlybird deadline of January 31.
TREK AND WARS STARS TO COME Although Fan Expo Vancouver was held from October 12 to 14, it’s returning this spring—the season when it was originally held annually.
The eighth edition will run from March 1 to 3. According to Fan Expo Vancouver public-relations representative Carine Redmond, the shift to the new dates will allow the event to retain this time frame at the Vancouver Convention Centre into the future.
The upcoming edition will feature Star Trek alum George Takei. Takei portrayed Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek TV series and in the Star Trek films, and has become a vocal activist for LGBT, Asian American, and other causes.
Another guest will be Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando Calrissian in Star Wars films and is slated to appear in the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode IX.
WEB FEST HITS PAUSE
The Vancouver Web Fest—which showcases digital storytelling and web-content creators—will be temporarily suspended in 2019.
VWF founder and executive director Suzette Laqua announced in a video posted on social media that it’s due to personal health concerns. However, Laqua and VWF correspondent Susie Lee explained in the video that they hope to mount the following edition, in 2020.
Laqua and Lee also said that they will continue to support content creators.
Adrian Mack
In what should presage a spectacular comeback for filmmaker Paul Schrader during the coming awards season, First Reformed collected three of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle’s top international prizes, announced Monday (December 17). Schrader himself took the award for best director and best screenplay, with Ethan Hawke beating out Christian Bale (Vice) and Viggo Mortensen (Green Book) to collect a well-deserved best-actor (male) honour for his role in First Reformed as a priest seriously embattled by issues of faith and health.
Schrader’s storied career hit rock bottom with 2013’s The Canyons, in which Lindsay Lohan was stunt-cast alongside porn star James Deen in a work reasonably described as one of the worst movies ever made by a major filmmaker. First Reformed returns the writer-director to his natural turf. In her review for the Georgia Straight, VFCC member Janet Smith points out the thematic similarities to Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver, while praising the film as a triumph of composition and formal reserve.
The award for best international film, meanwhile—and perhaps not surprisingly—went to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, otherwise known as the Netflix production that definitively upturned any arguments about the equivalence between big and small screens (and that continues its run at the Vancity Theatre until January 3). Roma was also named best foreign-language film.
If the sharing of those five major awards reflects a certain sort of diplomacy among the VFCC’S members, the race for best female actor was so
Ethan Hawke scores a win for First Reformed.
gtight that it forced a three-way split between Melissa Mccarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), Olivia Colman (The Favourite), and Regina Hall (Support the Girls). Opening in Vancouver on Friday (December 21), Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite also scored a best-supporting-actor (female) nod for Rachel Weisz. Richard E. Grant was named best supporting actor (male) for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, described by the Straight’s Ken Eisner in his review as one of the thesp’s meatiest performances since Withnail and I.
Finally, Minding the Gap—a portrait of three skateboarding friends shot over 12 years in Rockford, Illinois— was named best documentary. As ever, the VFCC is holding back the winners of its Canadian awards for its ceremony on January 7, when Edge of the Knife, Fausto, and Roads in February duke it out for the best-picture honour.
Chaired by Straight contributor Josh Cabrita, the Vancouver Film Critics Circle was founded in 2000 by critic David Spaner and the Straight’s late, great Ian Caddell.
dAN UNUSUALLY introspective anime, veteran toonsmith Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai homes in on one urban family quietly enduring fairly standard growing pains, starting with a grouchy working mom (voiced by Kumiko Asô) and a stay-at-home architect dad (Gen Hoshino) about to expand their little brood.
Those pains are not very quiet for four-year-old Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi), utterly freaked out by the arrival of baby sister Mirai. In Japanese, that means “future”, and this is underlined by a magical version of the more grown-up Mirai, voiced by Haru Kuroki, also central to Hosoda’s widely travelled Wolf Children. The apparition begins to infiltrate Kun’s consciousness to show him where his life is headed—if, you know, he doesn’t kill the little brat first.
When the train-obsessed Kun ventures from their tiny but incredibly well-designed house, he makes sporadic journeys through time, in both directions, from surprising intimations of trauma left over from the Second World War to an overwhelming stop at a massive Tokyo train station—with lost children exiled to a frightening place called Lonely Land.
The two-hour film, so gentle for its first quarter, is unexpectedly revealing of aspects of daily life Japanese entertainments don’t typically broach, including postpartum depression and gender-role expectations. The tale never loses its rare and deeply forgiving intimacy, and Hosoda keeps his finger firmly on the pulse of childhood, refusing to let sentimentality obscure scary truths about growing up.