Western Canadian Genie nominees were honoured at a reception in Vancouver Tuesday evening (March 1) in advance of the film awards.

Clare Contini, the manager of the western division of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, said it's been a strong year for Canadian movies.

“There’s films like Barney’s Version, Incendies”¦it didn’t win for the Oscar, but it was a contender, and that’s just fantastic, a really great profile for the Canadian film industry,” she said. “And then we’ve got Canadian films like Cole and Gunless”¦Overall it’s been a great year.”

Among the attendees at the event in the Shangri-La hotel in downtown Vancouver were Sonja Bennett, who is nominated for her supporting role performance in the Carl Bessai-directed film Cole.

Making the film in small-town B.C. was a memorable experience for the Vancouver-based actress, who has been acting professionally for about a decade.

“All of us were staying in this little motel,” she recounted. “After we’d shoot, we’d find ourselves drinking in this parking lot of a motel.”

“I looked around and I’m like—we’re living this experience,” she said, laughing. “It was really fun.”

John Zaritsky, the Vancouver director of the best-documentary nominated film Leave Them Laughing, also attended the reception.

Zaritsky, who has won multiple Gemini awards for his work in Canadian television, said he’s been waiting 25 years for the Genie nomination, his second after his 1985 documentary Tears Are Not Enough.

“It’s something quite I think radically different than anything I’ve ever done before,” said Zaritsky of Leave Them Laughing. “It fulfilled an ambition I’ve always had, which was to do a documentary which was a musical comedy—but it’s a musical comedy about dying.”

The documentary profiles Carla Zilbersmith, a comedian, singer-songwriter, performance artist and writer, who was battling ALS. The 47-year-old artist died last May.

Zaritsky described Zilbersmith as “the funniest person I’ve ever met.”

“She was I think surprisingly not really discovered in America, and yet I was very fortunate to come along, sadly near the end of her life,” said Zaritsky. “I always thought it was too bad that somebody hadn’t found her sooner than I had. She could have been definitely a regular on Saturday Night Live, places like that.”

Dennis Foon, co-writer of A Shine of Rainbows, a story about an Irish orphan, is nominated for his first Genie award.

“It’s really a great honour to have this kind of recognition—the film’s been winning awards all over the world,” he said. “It’s really gratifying.”

Despite this kind of recognition, Foon said Canadian film producers and writers are currently in a difficult situation. He said because there no revenues from American blockbuster films or licensing fees being used to support Canadian film, it has left many writers and filmmakers north of the border “scrambling” and often forced to do work for free.

“It’s not a good spot, because we’ve got such great talent to do so much, and when we do manage to pull it all together, it’s amazing—but so many people can’t do it, because they can’t afford to do it,” he said.

Stephanie Cadieux, the minister of community, sport and cultural development for B.C., who also attended the event, said the challenge for government is to strike a balance between keeping locals employed through the American film industry and to support home-grown talent.

“It is a balance to be found and we need to make sure that we’re supporting both, but it’s not one or the other,” she told the Straight.

Other guests at the reception Tuesday included Claude Paré, who is nominated for Barney’s Version, which is up for 11 awards, Leave Them Laughing nominee Montana Berg, and Beverley Wowchuk, who is nominated for achievement in costume design for Gunless.

The 31st annual Genie Awards, which will be hosted by William Shatner, will be broadcast live on CBC from Ottawa on March 10.