Two Coast film-makers will be screening their films at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) that runs from now to Oct. 16.
Pender Harbour's Dianne Whelan premiered her latest project, This Land, at the Calgary International Film Festival last weekend and earned a nomination for best short documentary. Next week the film will show in Ottawa at the Library and Archives Canada during the International Polar Conference.
Whelan is an award-winning Canadian photographer and journalist. After 20 years as a stills photographer, she made the transition to documentaries and was a student at Capilano University's documentary film department in Sechelt.
Her first film, This Land, produced with the National Film Board, captures one of the largest sovereignty patrols undertaken in the Canadian high Arctic. After seeing the Canadian flag in a similar context, Whelan said, "The image of the flag stirred up something in me that was very emotional. The same feeling I get when I'm watching the Canadian women's Olympic hockey team play for the gold medal."
She adds that seeing the flag in the arctic landscape also brought home some of the big issues of our times, like global warming.
In March 2007, Whelan and a team of seven men set out to cover more than 2,000 km of the harshest terrain on the planet in order to raise a flag on the northernmost tip of Canadian soil. With a mesmerizing soundtrack from Nunavut-born singer Tanya Tagaq and spectacular footage of the Arctic landscape, This Land captures this epic adventure with the raw immediacy of one who (barely) lived through it.
Whelan is currently in pre-production for her next film, 40 Days at Base Camp, which will be filmed on Mount Everest next spring. Her book, This Vanishing Land, will soon be released through Caitlin Press (Harbour Publishing). The film will screen at VIFF on Oct. 13 at 6 p.m. at Granville Cinema One and Oct. 15 at 4 p.m. at Granville Cinema Two. Whelan will be in attendance to meet the audience.
Certainty, a film by Gibsons-born filmmaker David Hauka, premiered at the Globians Film Festival in Berlin in August. Audience reaction was emotional and positive, said Hauka of the film that is based on his personal experience and memories. Certainty is an experimental film, a cinematic essay that collages music, images and text. It was four years in the making.
In order to trace his first experience with loss, Hauka revisited the death of his parents and recalled what influences were at work on him as a child that would later shape him as an adult; the space race, JFK's assassination, nuclear disaster, are all incorporated.
Hauka went to Elphinstone Secondary School, worked at the former Coast News for a while and greatly enjoyed his stint as an actor on the set of The Beachcombers, and later in Highlander. But being behind the camera suited his personality better, so he studied at the Simon Fraser University film workshop and quickly moved on to his producing and directing career.
His first winning film, Solus, screened at the 1986 Chicago International Film Festival and received the Gold Plaque in the Arts. He has directed major talent including Christopher Plummer, who he remembers as "a consummate actor" on the film Impolite.
Certainty represents a move back to pure film-making with time spent writing and producing his own work.
"I'm confronting something personal in it," he said. "It forced me to address more effective story telling."
Certainty shows at the Pacific Cinematheque on Tuesday, Oct. 6 at 9:15 p.m. and at VanCity Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. Hauka will definitely attend to meet film fans. He notes that, "Contrary to what Stephen Harper says, these festival parties are not times for sipping lattés. That's where we meet the media and make connections that will get financing for the next film."
More about both films can be found at www.viff.org.
