Best in the West

Though it was held in the West, Eastern Canada–based nominees conquered the 21st annual Gemini Awards at Richmond’s River Rock Casino last Saturday (November 4). Fifteen awards were presented in the 90-minute ceremony, with the last hour televised nationally on Global. The big winner on the final night (the first three nights of the Canadian-television
awards were held in Toronto in October) was Slings and Arrows, which took home three major awards: best dramatic series, best actor in a dramatic series (Mark McKinney), and best actress in a dramatic series (Martha Burns). B.C. did win one-and-a-half Geminis with the B.C./Saskatchewan coproduction Corner Gas winning best comedy and the Vancouver-based Global National With Kevin Newman winning Newman best news anchor.

Backstage, Newman said the real victory for B.C. television was that the final Gemini show was being held in Vancouver after being hosted in Toronto for 20 years. “Vancouver usually gets left out of these things,” he said. Maria Topalovich, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television’s president and CEO, said there was “a good chance” the Geminis would now travel to other Canadian centres; a similar decision has brought a significant amount of attention to Canada’s music awards, the Junos. Echoed Newman: “Moving the [Juno] awards around the country gives the industry a chance to see what the ordinary folks are up to.”

> Ian Caddell

Back in the USSR

There are at least two bona fide masterpieces in the Pacific Cinémathèque’s From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema series (Andrei Tarkovski’s Solaris and Stalker), but the real payoff is in guilty pleasures. Running until next Wednesday (November 22),
this festival of socialist surrealism includes “The Cameraman’s Revenge” (a stop-motion insect adultery movie made five years before the October Revolution!) and Aelita, Queen of Mars (from 1924, based on an early science-fiction novel by Alexei Tolstoy). First on the Moon, a mockumentary about cosmonauts who beat Neil Armstrong to the Sea of Tranquillity, is a partial parody of Cosmic Voyage, a 1936 propaganda piece that gets postmodernized 69 years later. The fantasy side of things is upheld by Ruslan and Ludmila, a 1972 spin on the famous Pushkin poem, and by Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, from 1961. The real delight of this series, though, is unquestionably The Amphibian Man. Shot in postrevolutionary Cuba in 1962 and featuring a hero with both lungs and gills, the end result is akin to a collaboration between Michael Powell, George Pal, and the campiest production designer they could find.

> Mark Harris

Everyone's a Winner

At the close of the Amnesty International Film Festival’s four-day run at the Pacific Cinémathèque on Sunday, (November 5), two National Film Board documentaries won top honours with Vancouver viewers. Raised to Be Heroes, writer-director Jack Silberman’s film about Israeli refuseniks, garnered the silver audience award. Métis writer-director Christine Welsh’s examination of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Saskatchewan and B.C.—including Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside—won gold with Finding Dawn. Festival director Don Wright said in a phone interview that relatives of the women attended the screening. “With growing awareness of how aboriginal women have been treated in Canada, for many decades and even centuries,” he said, “I think more and more people are wanting to hear these stories.” (Two American films, Visioning Tibet and Independent Intervention, tied for bronze.) Wright also noted the festival broke some records with the highest average number of viewers per show (116) and two sold-out screenings.

Concurrently, the Vancouver Asian Film Festival wrapped its 10th annual showcase of Asian cinematic talent at Tinseltown. At the VAFF Filmmaker’s Luncheon on November 12, the winners of the best Canadian short were revealed. Ling Chiu’s “Once a Fish”, a tale about a woman’s weekly visits to her father’s grave, garnered the $200 third place award. Renuka Jeyapalan’s “Big Girl” scooped second—and $300—with a story of a girl’s rivalry with her mother’s boyfriend. Life paralleled art as John Penhall’s “Inconvenience”, about a store owner who discovers a winning lottery ticket, won him the $500 top spot.

> Craig Takeuchi