Winners fete VIFF gala attendees
Violent: We Are The City created a fi lm, scripted it in Norwegian, composed its music and named it after their album
ROCKERS ON A ROLL: Many pop- music ensembles make movies. Usually they’re videos of songs the rockers hope will become hits. Not so the Kelowna-founded band called We Are The City. Drummer
Andrew Huculiak, guitaristsinger Cayne McKenzie, Andrew’s brother Josh and cousin Joseph
Schweers, wrote a fullblown $ 300,000 feature film for Andrew to direct, named it Violent after the band’s 10- song album, composed new soundtrack music, and scripted it in a language none of them speak: Norwegian.
In clear English, judges named it the Vancouver International Film Festival’s best B. C. and Canadian feature film for 2014.
Then, ever- ready for another gig, We Are The City played for attendees at the VIFF’s closing gala Friday.
CAST MASTERS: Davie Street’s Celebrities nightclub was the venue this week when Lucas Talent founder Richard Lucas and fellow principal
Eric Edwards marked their acquisition of Muse Entertainment and JR Talent. The move reportedly made the 28- yearold firm Western Canada’s largest such agency. Clients Kendall Cross and Matt Frewer celebrated with Lucas. Another, director Anne Wheeler, earned respect when the Vancouver International Film Festival screened her 1989 debut movie, Bye Bye Blues, to lucky sold- out audiences Wednesday and Thursday.
FAR OUT: The Out In Schools organization benefited when Carl Meadows and spouse Les Dick got 200 or so folk out and into Robert Kenney’s east side photo studio recently. The party and art auction reportedly raised $ 30,000. The take was $ 200 in 2003, “when we set out to stop children at school being attacked and called faggot, as we had been,” Meadows said. Project coordinator Jen Sung said OIS’s Teachers Learning Resource Guide has been purchased by 110 B. C. schools, including all those in Vancouver and Burnaby.
ROCK A BUY, BABY: Any old 10- carat diamond will get your attention. Then there’s the round brilliant that bling fanciers figure should cost $ 1.2 million but retails for $ 695,000 at
Oleg Minchenko and Aya Primbetova’s De Beers jewelry store. “I call it a clever diamond because its natural inclusions are where they can’t be seen by the naked eye,” London- based De Beers Institute of Diamonds president Andrew Coxon said at the store this week. “But it’s cut with all 57 facets perfectly aligned so that it looks to be the best quality and colour. And that’s a clever diamond.”
IRONY CROSS: Imagine Armed Forces men and women returning from countering ISIL’s appalling wickedness to receive medals from a prime minister Trudeau.
GLORY BE: Honouring those who fought long- ago battles and built Canada’s character, the 15th Field Regiment band and Vancouver Welsh Men’s Choir’s concert, With Glowing Hearts, will run at Gateway Theatre Nov. 7 and South Delta Baptist Church Nov. 11.
BAD, BADDER, BEST: Vancouver’s history of murders, riots, moral turpitude and political and police corruption pales beside that of Chicago and New York, whose Al Capone said: “I don’t even know what street Canada is on.”
Even so, local book publishers have found a market for it, albeit by re- stirring a rather scant scandal pot. For the newly released Vancouver Confidential, though, editor and Vancouver Noir co- author John Belshaw found fresh dirt to turn. One of his 15 contributors, Terry Watada, scores with an account of the Japanese community’s Black Dragon Society. So does Tom Carter, if less darkly, with recollections of hidehi- era nightclub owners and his cover painting of downtown East Hastings Street. There are rarely seen photos, too. Like a crook on the lam, this publishing trend clearly has a way still to go.
BUY AND CELL: Recently deceased West Vancouver resident Tony Strachan’s 94 years included five in a German prisoner- of- war camp. Several experiences there were worthy of the Hogan’s Heroes TV series or the three novels Strachan wrote and Penguin published. One bitter winter, he and fellow officers formally bid to buy the camp fee simple and use its surplus buildings as firewood. Astonishingly, officials allowed the prisoners instead to transfer their unspendable military pay to Britain and buy a Spitfire fighter that would oppose Germany’s own aircraft.
ARTSPEAK 101: From a recent invitation: “( So- and- so) will discuss the way in which animation has morphed from a formal engagement with time to an exploration of its transformation of both reality and vitality … effecting both material processes as well as the experience of time.”
PARRYDIDDLES: The Dirty Apron Cooking School still needs men to join oversubscribed women in a $ 158 matchmaking and gourmet-cooking class Nov. 1 … The adjective in its title hardly applies to Susan Mendelson’s Lazy Gourmet firm, which was 35 this week … By encouraging emerging artists since 2009, the Gam gallery has found its legs at Hastings and Columbia … South Granville’s Bau- Xi gallery is approaching its 50th … Force and farce may meet tonight and Sunday at the Rio theatre’s Star Wars- themed Reveal of The Jedi burlesque show … Thirty- nine breweries hope to get ahead at the BC Beer Awards Oct. 25 … Former stockbroker John Skinner’s Painted Rock concern was named Winery of The Year at the 16- nation InterVin Wine Awards this week.