Hot Docs gets million-dollar boost from Rogers
News: Hot Docs Ted Rogers Fund
Rogers Foundation partners with Hot Docs, Canada's leading documentary festival, to create new production fund named after late Canadian communications mogul Ted Rogers
By The Ex-Press
The cash-strapped world of documentary film just got a million dollars richer: Hot Docs and The Rogers Foundation announced the creation of a new fund to help filmmakers realize their non-fiction visions through production grants worth up to $35,000 Thursday.
Part of a $5-million dollar endowment from The Rogers Foundation that also includes a $4 million gift to buy the Hot Docs theatre on Toronto’s Bloor Street, the new Hot Docs Ted Rogers Fund will be administered by Hot Docs and support up to three or four projects each year.
“Hot Docs has a remarkable history of strengthening the documentary industry and supporting documentary filmmakers,” said Martha Rogers, chair of the Rogers Foundation. “We are proud to join their tradition with the establishm...
Tempest in a D-Cup
Interview: Tempest Storm, Icon of Burlesque
Valued for her physical appearance in a world where women were denied a voice, Tempest Storm found safe harbour and social power with a little jiggle and a lot of courage
By Jay Stone
Annie Banks was born on Leap Year Day 88 years ago in rural Georgia, a beautiful young girl destined to have an unhappy childhood. Her stepfather tried to sexually abuse her. Her classmates teased her because she had a womanly figure even as a young teenager. She ran away from home at 14 to get married to her first of four husbands (the marriages variously lasted one night, two weeks, two years and 10 years.) She moved to Las Vegas to be a showgirl and got hired as an exotic dancer: she asked her first agent, “Do you think my busts are too big for this business?”
It turns out that there was no such thing. After a while, the agent decided to give her a new, more exotic name, Sunny Day. “I’m not a Sunny Day,” she said, so the agent came up with ...
TIFF announces STUDIO slate
News: TIFF talent development
A lucky dozen writer-directors get their hands metaphorically dirty with development sessions and skills workshops at this year's TIFF STUDIO programme
By Katherine Monk
“Writer-director” sounds good, but in the world of Canadian Film, it often means a hand-to-mouth existence without external support.
The Toronto International Film Festival wants to change that, and this year, it refocused its STUDIO programme to assist writer-directors with a series of professional workshops designed to empower the nation’s storytellers.
The monthly modules began Friday with sessions that include peer review, project development, packaging and talent, working with actors and casting agents as well as the requisite art of the pitch pep talk.
“Since its launch in 2013, STUDIO has boasted immense success in readying Canadian producers for the global film industry,” said TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey in an announcement released Monday.
...
Xavier the Great crushes Cannes skeptics
News: Xavier Dolan wins Grand Prix, Ecumenical Prize at Cannes 2016
Quebec's golden boy picks up second-highest honour at Cannes, but his quest for the coveted golden palm continues, as does his battle with critics
By Katherine Monk
He didn’t win the Palme D’Or, but Xavier Dolan’s double win at this year’s Cannes Film Festival marks the best performance by a Canadian on the Croisette since Atom Egoyan scored a triple with The Sweet Hereafter back in 1997.
Dolan won the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Prize for his latest film Juste la fin du mode (It’s Only the End of the World), a drama that follows a writer with a terminal illness on his final journey home. Based on the stage play by the late Jean-Luc Lagarce, It’s Only the End of the World is Dolan’s sixth feature, and fifth title to be invited to France’s red carpet extravaganza.
“Dolan’s two latest awards at Cannes are renewed recognition of his immense talent, of course, but also of the determined ...
David Bezmozgis dives into Russian diaspora
Interview: David Bezmozgis on Natasha
The Toronto-based writer-director grew up in a community of Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, but decades later he says the "Russian immigrant experience" has become more difficult to define -- yet far more interesting to explore through drama
By Katherine Monk
The “immigrant experience” is a phrase that’s been getting a lot of media mileage in the wake of Syria’s collapse and continuing mass displacement due to climate change, but as a phrase, it’s generic.
It assumes all immigrants share a similar reality: a sense of exile and limited expression until assimilation takes hold. Toronto author and filmmaker David Bezmozgis thinks the North American “immigrant community” deserves better than a broad label between quotation marks, so he wrote a short story called Natasha, originally published in Harper’s before appearing in a bound collection in 2004.
A Lolita-like yarn about a sexy young Russian girl who moves ...
Art Bergmann plays The Apostate
Music: Interview with Art Bergmann
The former Vancouver punk icon says his joints are sore, his back aches and his neck breaks, but the release of his first new LP in a decade proves Art Bergmann is more than a survivor, he's close to folk hero
By Katherine Monk
For the first few minutes, we talk about sciatica, arthritis, spinal surgery and who’s dead. That's just what happens when you're over 50 and you haven't spoken to someone in 20 years. Even if that someone is Art Bergmann – the iconic face of Canadian punk rock turned apostate.
Make that “The Apostate,” because after an extended recording hiatus that witnessed the release of just one EP and a lost recordings collection over the course of a decade, Bergmann has a new LP, The Apostate, what he calls his “response to living in the west."
Bouncing from Vancouver to a small parcel of Albertan landscape situated near “the beige town of Airdrie,” Bergmann started a new life with his wife Sherri a decade ...
Nadia Litz and Jai West dig deep in The People Garden
People: Interview - Nadia Litz and Jai West on The People Garden
The former actor and first-time feature director says she wanted to create a female character in her 20s who could ride a wave of emotional ambiguity to escape the warm, fuzzy, vulnerable and typically banal female box
By Katherine Monk
VANCOUVER, BC – Ambiguity isn’t a topic that generally lends itself to passion, yet a recent sit-down with director-writer Nadia Litz and actor Jai West reveals a mental desire to resist closure that’s near obsessive.
“Oh man. Ambiguity is the whole thing…” says Litz. “It’s everything. It’s the theme of the film: that there is no black and white conclusion to anything. It’s what relationships are. It’s what life is. It’s what death is.”
When Litz talks about “the whole thing,” she’s talking about The People Garden, her debut feature starring West, Pamela Anderson and Dree Hemingway (daughter of Mariel Hemingway, niece of the late Margaux). ...
Millennium haunted by ghosts of Al Waxman, Maury Chaykin
From the Bottom of the Pile
Movies: Blu-ray review - Millennium
Finding a little piece of Canada's film past, and a message from the future, in the wreckage of a 1980s science fiction film starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd
Father, motherland, Rossif Sutherland
People: Interview - Rossif Sutherland
The Sutherland with the curious accent makes a dark turn in River before preparing for a new Catastrophe on French-Canadian television
By Katherine Monk
As far as Sutherlands go, he’s the tall one. You could see it when he appeared on stage next to his legendary father, Donald, at the recent Canadian Screen Awards. Rossif’s thick brown hair stood just a shade taller than his father’s flattening white pate.
Career-wise, however, there’s still a ways to go before he reaches the same stature as the Sutherland who appeared in M*A*S*H and Ordinary People. Or even that of his half-brother Kiefer. Not that he really cares.
“I don't care much about what people think about me. If they don’t like me, they don’t like me. You can be the nicest person in the room… it doesn’t matter…. And I’ve never been very strategic with my choices, and maybe my career has suffered for it,” says Vancouver-born Rossif Sutherland from ...
