Hailed as a great speech, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inaugural 1961 address to the world held out hope for a better future.
How different our times are today: as ever increasing amounts of scarce financial resources are spent on armaments and we watch as our sons and daughters die in far off lands for reasons unclear to almost all of us, as homeless sleep in our streets, when far too many children live in poverty and want, and when division and indifference define the body politic.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann On The Politics of Fear
VIFF: The Festival Ends, The 3rd To Last VIFF Posting
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The 25th annual Vancouver International Film Festival draws to a close, The Lives of Others wins The People’s Choice Award, Greg Hamilton picks up the Most Popular Canadian Feature Award for Mystic Ball, and the Best Doc Award goes to Connie Field’s Have You Heard from Johannesburg?, with a Special Jury Prize awarded to Gary Burns and Jim Brown, for Radiant City.
Paul Fox won the Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award for the realization of Douglas Coupland’s screenplay for Everything’s Gone Green, while special mention for its “bold and provocative directorial style” went to Carl Bessai’s Unnatural & Accidental, and for which lead actress Carmen Moore picked up Vancouver’s Women in Film & Video Merit Award.
Earlier, the Dragons and Tigers Award went to Todo Todo Teros, with special mention made by the jury for Faceless Things and Geo-Lobotomy.
From beginning to end for the fabulous 25th anniversary edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, the weather was great, and the films even better. The time has now come to get back to our real (rather than reel) lives. Even so, we invite u to come back for our final 2 VIFF postings.
T’nite, we’ll leave you with our festive final gala piece (courtesy of ‘Kino’) …
Again, don’t forget to return to VanRamblings next week for our ‘Fest wrap-up posting’ and, finally, for our VIFF silver anniversary tribute.
See ya then.
VIFF2006: Vancouver As Cultural Backwater
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Two hundred films bypass Vancouver every year.
Art, independent, Canadian, foreign, low-budget, experimental — the kind of films Vancouverites would flock to if there was a theatre owner in town who cared enough about film to build a thriving art-house cinema.
But there ain’t no one like that in Vancouver, and as a consequence 200 well-reviewed, high-grossing (in markets similar to Vancouver, like Portland, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Baltimore, Boston and other medium-sized American cities) indie films never cross the border to find a home in Vancouver.
Each year, the Vancouver International Film Festival screens some 250 feature films, very few of which have a Canadian distributor in place. So, whether it’s Dito Montiel’s terrifically-nuanced and affecting Sundance produced A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, or the hard-hitting Australian drama Candy — neither one of which has a Canadian distributor in place — if you live in Greater Vancouver, and don’t catch a screening of many of the films included in the VIFF schedule, you’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to seeing these pictures on the big screen, or ever.