Gregor Ash, executive director of the Atlantic Film Festival Association, speaks at the opening of the 26th Atlantic Film Festival. (Hugh Reynolds/Atlantic Film Festival)
The 26th annual Atlantic Film Festival kicked off on Sept. 14 in Halifax. Running until Sept. 23, this year’s edition is screening 223 features, shorts and documentaries. The event showcases new and established filmmakers from Atlantic Canada alongside some of the big North American and world movies making the rounds on the festival circuit. Related workshops, panels and concerts fill out the AFF’s schedule — all unfolding in gorgeous Maritime late summer weather. Festival organizers have maintained a small, intimate feel for this Atlantic affair. CBC Arts Online brings a series of reports from Halifax.
Sept. 14 through 17
A particular scene played over and over again during the opening days and nights of the 26th annual Atlantic Film Festival. Friends reconnected. They waved to each other from a few theatre rows over or passed drinks over the heads of the crowds during the parties that followed the screenings. A spirit of reunion rose during these first four dates.
The AFF’s perennial sense of intimacy and ease has remained the draw to Halifax for its participants. The anxiety felt last year, when the Festival International de Films de Montreal (FIFM) switched its dates to overlap with its Atlantic Canadian counterpart, has dissipated. (FIFM organizers moved its inaugural edition to avoid competing directly with Montreal’s other film festival, Montreal Festival de Nouveau Cinema, which is running from mid- to late October.)
The screenings kicked off with a considered and melancholic opening night gala (which also opened the Toronto International Film Festival), The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, co-directed by Zacharias Kunuck and Norman Cohn. An outdoor party on Argyle Street followed. Nova Scotia’s Blou played its energetic mix of Acadian, Cajun-zydeco and folk music, but the band’s energy went nowhere. Despite invitations from the group, few, if anyone, danced and the applause was halting. It wasn’t the band’s fault. They were facing a 3,000-strong crowd with arguably different expectations for a marquee downtown event. A pop-rock outfit such as In-Flight Safety might have worked better. After all, the band’s tune The World Won’t is the festival’s theme song this year. (In-Flight Safety is set to play on Sept. 22 as part as AFF’s Music and Image Showcase II.)
A scene from Mary Walsh's film Young Triffie's Been Made Away With. (TVA Films)
The opening night jitters were quickly forgotten by Friday. Mary Walsh’s tale of pre-Confederation Newfoundland, Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, was funny and dark. Walsh treated the sold-out crowd at the Oxford Theatre, Halifax’s grande dame of movie houses, to a hilarious introductory speech. She joked about wasting her “youth and beauty” on the CBC — and this at the CBC Atlantic Gala. Walsh’s co-star, Andrea Martin (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Wag the Dog), added some shenanigans. After revealing this was her first time seeing the film, Martin warned she might get upset depending on how the final cut looked: “They cut my scenes!” she wailed in mock horror while running up the aisle.
Martin’s physical acting and handling of her character’s darker moments is a big reason Young Triffie works. So too is Corner Gas’s Fred Ewaniuck, playing a Newfoundland Ranger who is out of his depth trying to solve the murder of a young girl in a remote community. Ewaniuck plays confusion note-perfect. Walsh steps from behind the camera to play the nosy, gossipy postmistress. Her scenes with former flame (and ex-Codco cast mate) Andy Jones’s maniacal pastor — the two characters scream at one another — were as frightening as they are funny. “That’s what it was like when we lived together,” Walsh joked with the audience afterwards.
This year, international producers reportedly outnumbered their domestic counterparts at the festival’s Strategic Partners conference (Sept. 15 to 17). Snow Cake is one of the co-productions that’s likely to attract interest from both camps. The film tells a story about an autistic woman and mother (Sigourney Weaver) who must cope with a major and tragic event in her family with the help of a stranger (Alan Rickman). Afterwards, director Marc Evans, actor Emily Hampshire and producers Niv Fichman and Jessica Daniel took questions from the audience. The crowd asked about everything: from the music to the interiors and exteriors (one viewer praised the crew’s ability to capture “winter light”) to the Northern Ontario setting (Wawa, to be exact) to the screenplay (written by Briton Angela Pell, herself a parent, along with executive producer Henry Normal, to an autistic child). The Q&A lasted so long that festival organizers had to cut off the questions and rush the audience out for the already-delayed next film.
On Sunday, the continuing late summer in Halifax made the walk to Park Lane Theatres more of an amble. A lazy afternoon was perfect for settling in to watch dance on film. In the eight-minute short Rules of the Road, director Deborah Vanslet sends up the rite and drudgery of hitchhiking on Canadian highways through the tightly choreographed movements of two dancers.
The theatre was cool and full of friendly chatter between that screening and the next: German director Marcus Behrens’s Decoding the Undertow, a performance film that captures choreographer and dancer Sally Morgan’s efforts to bring together skateboarders and dancers. A making-of documentary by former Haligonian and now Montreal-based filmmaker Colin MacKenzie followed. It showed how close the skaters, dancers and crew became during Behrens’s project.
The audience clustered into smaller conversations after those films, encapsulating what the festival is all about. Through its first four days, the Atlantic Film Festival is fulfilling its role as a focused and friendly affair.
Sean Flinn is a freelance journalist in Halifax.
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