Four films in Whistler Film Festival

This weekend's Whistler Film Festival, an international competitive event screening 92 independent films in 4 days, will feature the documentaries, Weird Sex and Snowshoes, 100% Woman and Call It Karma, as well as Ling Chiu's short, A Fortune in Frozen Dim Sum. All four are distributed by Moving Images Distribution.

World premiere of the fast-paced and funny Weird Sex and Snowshoes: A Trek through the Canadian Cinematic Psyche will take place on Fri, Dec 3 at 9:30pm. A second screening of the popular film has been added on Sat, Dec 4 at 5pm. Loosely based on the acclaimed book by Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk, Weird Sex is a smorgasbord of interviews and film clips that gives 21 celebrated Canadian directors the chance to sound off on "just what is Canadian cinema?" Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand, Zacharias Kunuk, Mina Shum and Lynne Stopkewich, to name a few, reveal opinions as diverse as their filmmaking styles. The 60-minute doc is created and produced by Gabriela Schonbach, directed by Jill Sharpe and associate produced by Sauching Ng, for Omni Film Productions. Jill Sharpe and Katherine Monk will be in attendance.

Another world premiere, Call It Karma plays Fri, Dec 3 at 7pm and is the inspiring true story of young Tibetan Monk Gyalten Rinpoche. In 1995 at the request of his Master, he made a 1,000-mile pilgrimage, crossing the rooftop of the world to arrive in Vancouver and establish a Buddhist center. With director Geoff Browne as his travel companion, Rinpoche journeys back to his home village for an emotional reunion with his Master and family. Call It Karma was produced by Shan Tam, Michael Parker and Geoff Browne and written by Jack Silberman, Parker and Browne. Geoff Browne will attend the screening.

Screening Fri, Dec 3 at 7pm, 100% Woman begins as Michelle Dumaresq's mountain-bike riding career did, careening down a rocky path to be met with controversy. At the centre of it all is the past of this extreme athlete—in particular, the first 20-odd years of life that Michelle spent as Michael. The first openly transgendered woman in the world to be named to a national team in any sport,

	A Fortune in Frozen Dim Sum

Dumaresq insists she doesn't race to make a stand, but doesn't shy from being a trailblazer. Beginning with her days on the BC race circuit, to the Canada Cup, the national title and finally, a berth at the World Championships, her progress is dogged by constant scrutiny, both from fellow competitors and the media. The film is directed by Karen Duthie, produced by Diana Wilson and co-written by Duthie and Wilson. Producer Wilson will be in attendance.

A Fortune in Frozen Dim Sum, a quirky short from Vancouver-Toronto filmmaker Ling Chiu, begins with a light-hearted assertion: "Fortune was always there; you can't be Chinese and not know about it." As she tells the sweet, complex and near-tragic tale of one Chinese immigrant family and their brush with disaster, she folds in sibling rivalry, romance, lost dreams, old secrets, family economics and Grandma's lucky encounter with an ill-fated squirrel, to arrive at a poignant conclusion. The film is the opener for Phil the Alien on Sat, Dec 4 at 9:30pm.

All four of these films will be screening at the Village 8 Cinemas. Organizers are expecting a full-house for these and other screenings, so make your ticket purchases ASAP by calling the box office at (604) 628-7049 or visiting the Whistler Film Festival web site .

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Deconstructing Supper at Victoria's Open Cinema

This Tuesday, December 7, Victoria's Open Cinema presents Marianne Kaplan's DECONSTRUCTING SUPPER with local farmer and chef Mara Jernigan in attendance to lead post-screening discussion.

The controversy behind genetically modified foods (GMOs) is at the center of Deconstructing Supper, an impassioned exploration into the politics, economics and ethics of eating. Travelling from North America to Great Britain to India and back, gourmet chef John Bishop meets scientists and activists with opposing views on genetic engineering, journalists and farmers who have experienced the might of giant biotech corporations, and organic farmers in India who are fighting to preserve the natural biodiversity of crops. The Toronto Star calls it "A fascinating, if disturbing, primer on the subject of genetically modified food. It manages to instruct without scolding, explore without preaching, and ultimately, should interest anybody who eats." The thought-provoking doc was directed by Marianne Kaplan and produced by Leonard Terhoch and Marianne Kaplan. It is available from Moving Images Distribution.

As a special seasonal treat at the screening, Small Potatoes Urban Delivery is donating organic BC potatoes and apples for latkes and apple sauce, in celebration of the first night of Chanukah.

For more information on Open Cinema café screenings, visit www.opencinema.ca

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100% Woman

Karen Duthie/Diana Wilson
100 Percent Woman Productions
59 minutes • 2004

100% Woman begins as Michelle Dumaresq's mountain-bike riding career did, careening down a rocky path to be met with controversy. From some critics comes cautious concern, from others, complete attack. At the centre of it all is the past of this extreme athlete—in particular, the first 20-odd years of life that Michelle spent as Michael.

In 2002, Dumaresq became the first openly transgendered woman in the world to be named to a national team in any sport. Beginning with her days on the BC race circuit, to the Canada Cup, the national title and finally, a berth at the World Championships, her progress is dogged by constant scrutiny, both from fellow competitors and the media. Dumaresq insists she doesn't race to make a stand, but doesn't shy from being a trailblazer. She grew up in turmoil over her identity and struggled to come to terms with herself as an adult, even with her parents' whole-hearted support. She takes on the mantle of role model because she understands how isolated others like her feel. Dr. Jerrilyn Prior, the pioneer of sex-hormone use in gender re-assignment therapy, backs up Dumaresq's quest to compete and explains how hormonal changes drastically reduce musculature.

This compelling documentary raises timely questions about what it means to be a "real" woman in the world of competitive sports and beyond.

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Alicia and the Mystery Box

France Benoit
38 minutes • 2003
Also available on DVD

Cuba, Québec, Yellowknife, Halifax and Puerto Rico mix in this emotional documentary about memory, family, culture, politics and identity. France Benoit is a Québécoise living in the Northwest Territories. During a visit to her in-laws, she discovers an unexplained box of mementoes from Cuba nestled in a trunk. Her husband can only tell her that his late grandfather once worked in the Canadian embassy in pre-Castro Havana. But the contents of the box clearly belong to someone else—black and white photos of a wealthy Cuban family, baptismal certificates, newspaper clippings and baby books lovingly inscribed in English handwriting. Immediately, France vows to find the rightful owner and return these treasures.

What she discovers is Alicia de Arango and a Cuban family history marked by privilege, intrigue and the tragic reversal of fortunes that followed Castro's revolution. The journey takes France, mystery box in hand, from her home in the Northwest Territories to Cuban history expert John M. Kirk at Dalhousie University, to Alicia's new home in San Juan, Puerto Rico and, of course, to Cuba. For France, the odyssey is cultural, political and deeply personal. She cherishes the unexpected chance to connect with Alicia, a kindred spirit living outside her homeland, negotiating two cultures and thriving through change because of the strong bonds of family.

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Call It Karma

Geoff Browne
48 minutes • 2004
Also available on DVD

Call It Karma is the inspiring true story of young Tibetan Monk Gyalten Rinpoche who in 1995 was sent on a spiritual pilgrimage by his Master to walk 1,000 miles from his remote mountain village. Through the Holy City of Lhasa, starving and exhausted, he makes his way across the rooftop of the world to the impoverished Nepalese villages and into the sacred lands of India.

Nearly six years later, he establishes a Buddhist center in the West and befriends filmmaker Geoff Browne on the streets of Vancouver. Together, they travel back to the Rinpoche's home village where Geoff witnesses an emotional reunion between the Rinpoche, his Master and family.

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Crank

Kevin Langdale
6 minutes • 2001

Crank juxtaposes the seemingly nonsensical with the precision of science, classification and system. Our belief in the order of language does not guarantee communication. Ultimately we are left with a disturbing picture of the futility of the urban environment—city as machine.

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The Drawing

Jason Buxton
20 minutes • 2004
Also available on DVD

A young boy encounters critics' barbs early when his teacher and classmates ridicule his pencil sketch of a dinosaur. Staying true to his artistic temperament literally takes the 10-year old to society's fringes and makes his re-entry into playground politics an exercise in exile. Beautifully and starkly shot, this stylish drama deftly accesses the intense focus of a child's imagination.

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Fortune Cookies

Xia Tong
15 minutes • 2004
In English and Chinese with English sub-titles

Filmmaker Xia Tong explores the loneliness and turmoil that often mark the transition to a new country. His blend of poetry, memory and dreams, intercut with overheard conversations, street festival chaos and news bytes about the illegal Chinese migrants off the BC coast, create a devastating portrait of the isolation and identity loss often overlooked in the celebration of multiculturalism.

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A Fortune in Frozen Dim Sum

Ling Chiu/Selena La Brooy
Earthling Films
13 minutes • 2004
Also available on DVD

Ling Chiu's quirky short drama begins with a light-hearted assertion: “Fortune was always there; you can't be Chinese and not know about it.” As she tells the sweet, complex and near-tragic tale of one Chinese immigrant family and their brush with disaster, she folds in sibling rivalry, romance, lost dreams, old secrets, family economics and Grandma's lucky encounter with an ill-fated squirrel, to arrive at a poignant conclusion. In the end, their true fortune may turn out to be their devotion to each other.

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Landscape Revealed: The Art of Toni Onley

Mehdi Ali
Fountain Productions
46 minutes • 2004

Best known for moody landscapes of Canada's West Coast, Vancouver artist Toni Onley devoted his trademark vigor, passion and sensitivity not only to his celebrated paintings, but also to his philanthropic pursuits, high-profile activism, vast network of personal relationships and, of course, the flying of his beloved plane. Landscape Revealed: The Art of Toni Onley includes recent interviews with the late artist, at work on the BC shores he cherished. It brings to life not only Onley's contemplative artistic process but also his energetic and provocative public life.

An internationally acclaimed artist with works in London's Tate Gallery, NYC's Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Onley gained notoriety in 1983 when he took on Revenue Canada and its unfair tax laws for artists. A very public battle saw him threaten to burn one million dollars' worth of his paintings on Wreck Beach, before an 11th-hour response from the federal government. He would again use his prominence for political ends when he joined the fight to save the Stein and Carmanah Valleys, two of BC's last stands of old-growth forest. His iconoclasm, though well publicized, did not stop him from receiving the Order of Canada in 1990.

This intimate documentary includes interviews with Onley's many friends, colleagues and admirers—including artists Alan Wood and David Lemon, critics Max Wyman and Susan M. Mertens, Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Ian Thom, UBC art professor George Knox, National Gallery of Canada curator Denise Leclerc, and Western Canada Wilderness Committee activist Joe Foy. With archival footage of such Canadian luminaries as Jack Shadbolt, George Woodcock and Liona Boyd, as well as a rousing written correspondence with Pierre Trudeau, Landscape Revealed paints a picture of man whose abiding legacy is the zest he had for life.

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Light: More than Meets the Eye
(A 2-part series)

Michaelin McDermott
Sunstroke Films
2004

This two-part series considers the fierce, wondrous power we call light. Featuring interviews with the world's leading scientists and thinkers, eye-popping displays of their fantastic innovations, historical re-enactments, and archival footage, these documentaries illuminate a vast, extended family of energies—a.k.a. light—that make up the forces at the very heart of our universe.

Beings of Light 46 minutes
Since Edison popularized the electric light bulb, we've been busy refining life in the electric fast lane. In Beings of Light, some critical thinkers consider how we continue to be controlled by light even though we're no longer confined by the simple rhythm of day and night.

Novelist Victoria Glendinning and social critic Edward Tenner chronicle the electricity revolution, while international dark sky experts advocate a return to nighttime darkness. Neurobiologist Dr. George Brainard demystifies the esoteric notion of the "third eye"—pinpointing it as the tiny pineal gland that regulates melatonin in response to the amount of light our brains receive. Psychiatrist Dr. Raymond Lam considers light's healthy impact on those suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD), PMS and bulimia. Biophysicist Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp reveals that even human beings emit light, in tiny ultra-low-intensity emissions known as biophotons, invisible to the naked eye.

Energies of Light 46 minutes
Science has advanced more in the last few decades than all of previous human history but that pales in comparison to what lies ahead. Light is leading the next revolution. Energies of Light meets up with some extraordinary visionaries who are taming light's power.

Dr. Paul MacCready is an engineer, inventor and sunlight nut who has designed and built a long line of alternative vehicles, including the world's largest solar-powered airplane, Helios, built for high altitude flying and even perpetual flight. UBC astrophysicist Dr. Jaymie Matthews discusses the schizophrenic nature of light's many forms—radio waves, microwaves, infrared, UV, x-rays and gamma rays, to name a few. Richard Edlund, the special effects wizard best known for films like Star Wars and Poltergeist, explains how movie makers manipulates pixels of light. Radio-astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter attempts to make 'contact' with extraterrestrials via the light energy of radio waves. Dr. Louis Friedman, a former NASA project leader, is at the center of a private American-Russian initiative to launch the world's first solar-sail spacecraft, which could use the power of light to travel as far as Jupiter.

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Little Boy Blue

Donna Barker
Adisen Productions
8 minutes • 2004

Includes discussion guide
Also available on DVD

Over 11 million American children took antidepressant drugs in 2003. And the numbers are growing quickly—particularly among children aged five and younger. Little Boy Blue blends startling statistics with expert testimony, a mock public service announcement and words-from-the-mouths-of-babes to deliver a message that is a hard pill to swallow.

University of Victoria drug-policy researcher Alan Cassels asserts "the [pharmaceutical] industry is in basically two businesses—the business of creating chemicals and the business of creating disease." He examines the manipulative advertising techniques employed by drug companies and points out that they spend more money educating doctors about drugs than all medical schools in Canada combined. He also highlights the research of Dr. Andrew Mosholder, a senior epidemiologist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In 2003, Mosholder found that children given antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to become suicidal.

Ultimately, this cautionary documentary challenges parents to arm themselves with questions before putting their children in the hands of "experts."

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My Hurricane

Lulu Keating
Red Snapper Film
5 minutes • 2004

In this dreamy, fractured drama, a woman recalls the recent death of her lover. The remembered rhythms of his last breaths build into the hurricane winds that pounded Nova Scotia in September 2003. The violent squall matches the turbulence of her life. Told in narrative fragments, layered with whispers, an emergency radio broadcast, the lonely whistles of wind and the savage crack of falling branches, My Hurricane becomes a tale of a woman overcome by storm, but in its lull, surfacing.

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Les passeurs

Hejer Charf
Nadja Productions
79 minutes • 2003

Fictional characters Ulysse, Maya, Adam, Barbara and Thomas pace Montreal's Boulevard St. Laurent, attuned to the stories of the real people they meet. A Haitian Innu, a punk rocker, a pale-skinned Cree, a Laotian theology student, a Hassidic couple, an elderly matron from the townships who was her family's seventh-born…with candour, passersby express a sense of belonging to the city, their culture, community, family and language. The facets of their identity complement one another as often as clash. On one level a film about being Québécois, at another, it is a meditation on storytelling, on the many worlds we visit through poetry, song and personal narrative. As the young wanderers absorb the rhythm of every overheard language, they begin to understand more closely how each person cobbles together identity.

Interweaving scenes from Le chat dans le sac, Gilles Groulx's seminal film on Québec's Quiet Revolution, filmmaker Hejer Charf both employs a "Cinéma direct" style and reconsiders the isolation felt by Québec's Francophone majority. The two solitudes may have multiplied as the face of Montreal has diversified, but Les passeurs points to a future where Montreal's many cultures create a new collective identity. With quotes from Jack Kerouac, Omar Khayyam, the Koran, Arthur Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke, this road movie of less than a dozen blocks embraces all the world.

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Team Spirit: The Jordin and Terence Tootoo Story

Ken Malenstyn/Barrie Dunn/Alexis Arthur
Big Red Barn Entertainment/Trailer Park Productions
48 minutes • 2004

Also available on DVD

Team Spirit: The Jordin and Terence Tootoo Story starts in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut during the summer of 2002, as two Inuit brothers are making history. Twenty-two-year old Terence has become the first Inuk to play professional hockey, and 19-year-old Jordin is trying out for Canada's 2002 national junior team and ultimately the NHL. But tragedy strikes when Terence suddenly commits suicide. Jordin, left with the full weight of role-model pressure and the increasing glare of the media spotlight, strives to carry on and realize his dreams.

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Weird Sex and Snowshoes: A Trek through the Canadian Cinematic Psyche

Directed by Jill Sharpe
Produced by Gabriela Schonbach
Omni Film Productions
59 minutes • 2004

If you had to boil Canadian film down, would you get the unlikely combo of awkward sex pitched against a barren northern landscape? Weird Sex and Snowshoes, the fresh, fast-paced, funny documentary based loosely on Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk's acclaimed book, is cagey enough to say just that. And more.

A smorgasbord of interviews and film clips, Weird Sex gives some of Canada's most celebrated filmmakers the chance to sound off on "Just what is Canadian film?" Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage, Patricia Rozema, Denys Arcand, Zacharias Kunuk, Denis Villeneuve, Lynne Stopkewich, Clement Virgo, and others reveal opinions as diverse as their filmmaking styles. But despite scads of ideas, certain defining characteristics do emerge: a fascination with the outsider, exiled by Canada's enormous geography, cultural differences, internal demons; the everyday and ordinary made by turns poignant, bizarre and even mystical; a willingness to take artistic risks; a style that borrows heavily from both documentary and theatre; absurdist humour; and it goes without saying, the ever-present influence and reaction against the behemoth to the south, the USA.

As scenes from Mon Oncle Antoine, Atanarjuat, My American Cousin, Rude, Margaret's Museum, Jesus de Montreal, The Saddest Music in All the World, 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, Flower & Garnet, Goin' Down the Road, and all told more than 70 Canadian films, rocket across the screen, the notion of a unified Canadian cinema starts to take shape.

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For more information, contact Moving Images Distribution

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