Now in its 17th year, the Atlantic Film Festival wrapped Sept. 27 after nine days of parties, seminars, schmoozing and the screening of a record 211 films from local, Canadian and international filmmakers.

Beginning with an opening night gala on Friday for hometown sensation Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden and ending with an awards presentation at the closing night party at Pier 22 the following Saturday, the festival proved to be a non-stop examination of all things in the international film business with a refreshing local focus.

Fitzgerald picked up The Motion Picture Bond $5,000 award for best Atlantic feature as well as the William F. White awards for best direction and writing, and the Casablanca Sound-sponsored award for best sound.

The Emotion/Triptych/Galafilm coproduction not surprisingly scooped TMN-The Movie Network’s People’s Choice Award for best feature, and the film’s stars Troy Veinotte and Joan Orenstein respectively took the craft awards for best male and female performances.

Veinotte shared the best male acting award with Jason Betts who starred in local director Scott Simpson’s 10-minute short Terminal Lunch, which took the Telefilm Canada $10,000 award for best Atlantic short film. The film’s dop David Albiston snagged the William F. White cinematography award in competition with the local features, and the team of Marianne Scriven and Emily Parks took top art direction honors.

Angela Baker won the best editing award for her work on Anita McGee’s National Film Board-produced Seven Brides for Uncle Sam, and Halifax director and 1996 best Atlantic short film winner for Liquor Store Mike Clattenburg won the $1,500 Rex Tasker Award for best Atlantic documentary for Far From Home. A deeply personal piece that chronicles Clattenburg’s cultural disorientation and illness during a trip to India, Clattenburg says he wanted to call the film India Kicks My Ass, but broadcaster CBC Atlantic suggested otherwise.

Clattenburg has a slew of projects in development with partners Jonathan Torrens and Brian Heighton of Torrential Pictures, including a feature and a television special, and he is hoping that the cbc will broadcast Far From Home nationally. Clattenburg says that when the documentary, which includes copyright-cleared songs from former Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrel, aired in the Atlantic region earlier this month it pulled in 260,000 viewers.

Former Degrassi producer and director Kit Hood took the Screenscene children’s choice award for best feature for his debut effort Dancing on the Moon, while the Linda Joy Media Arts Award for most promising new director went to Ariella Pahllke for Charlie’s Prospect. Pahllke will receive $3,000 in services and $250 in materials from P.S. Atlantic and $1,500 cash from the Directors Guild of Canada.

But before all the awards were handed out at the rocking closing-night bash, a week of screenings and events went off without a hitch under the leadership of new festival executive director Gordon Whittaker, who has managed to keep the festival’s local mandate intact while attracting guests and delegates from all facets of the industry worldwide.

Winnipeg’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs producer Ritchard Findlay made his first trip to Halifax and says he would have stayed were it not for his development projects back home with his Marble Island Pictures.

Among the notables in attendance was esteemed British actor John Hurt, star of Imagex’s Love and Death On Long Island, along with the film’s director Richard Kwietniowski, who picked up the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation/Kodak-sponsored $2,500 Margaret Perry Award for best Nova Scotia-produced film.

aff was clearly a festival where Canadian features and shorts took center stage. With 32% of the festival’s films coming from the Atlantic region, there were a total of 68 films in the Atlantic Focus series and 54 films in the Canada Perspective series.

Toronto-based first-time director Mike McGowan’s film My Dog Vincent, which was nixed for a spot at the Toronto International Film Festival this year while playing to positive response at the Montreal World Film Festival, was among the Canadian films garnering special notice in Halifax.

Director Clement Virgo’s The Planet of Junior Brown, executive produced by festival delegate Victor Solnicki of Toronto’s The Film Works, played midweek to a responsive local audience.

Virgo served on the ‘Dialogue with Directors’ panel along with Hood, Kwietniowski and actor/ writer/director Shawn Alex Thompson, whose Paragon film Dinner at Fred’s had its world premiere at the aff. Thompson clearly enjoyed the response to his comedy starring Parker Posey, Gil Bellows, Kevin MacDonald and Christopher Lloyd, though he was still a little miffed at not making the cut at tiff.

Thompson feels that although our best entertainment export is comedy a la Mike Myers and Jim Carrey, festivals like tiff and the Canadian funding agencies don’t seem to support film comedy.

Thompson points to Paragon and Jay Switzer’s prebuy from Citytv as the type of support Canuck film comedy needs.

‘Canada has a reputation for making kinky, sexually colorful films like Kissed, Exotica and Crash,’ says Thompson, who was born in Berwick, n.s., 90 miles outside of Halifax. ‘We’re leaving the impression that those are the only kind of movies we make.’

Thompson was heading off to screen Dinner at Fred’s at a festival in Hamburg, Germany, where the film is already presold to a distributor. ‘Germans aren’t known for their sense of humor,’ says Thompson, who feels that if his film is well received in Germany it should do fine when it hits the American festivals at Mill Valley and Hollywood where he will be looking for a u.s. distribution deal.

Thompson says he hopes to continue to make films in Canada and has just optioned his script The Hunting Season with Alan Kaplan of l.a.’s Wavecrest. Thompson was also pitching a script with a local angle to producers at the festival. Purple Boy (working title) is about a boy with a birthmark that covers his entire body who must helm a lighthouse by himself when his mother dies, until one day the daughter of a billionaire ends up on the island after falling off her father’s yacht.

Also in Halifax for Paragon/ HandMade was Glace Bay-born director Daniel Petrie (A Raisin in the Sun, The Bay Boy) with The Assistant starring Gil Bellows and Joan Plowright. Following the screening, the legendary Petrie made a heartfelt and honest speech to the audience stating that he was not happy with the current cut of the film based on the Bernard Malamud novel. After asking for audience feedback and suggestions, Petrie is now in Toronto recutting The Assistant out of his own pocket with editor Pete Watson.

Late in the week, Film Works’ Solnicki and Barry Cameron of Fredericton’s Cinefile Productions made a major joint-venture announcement that will see the two companies teaming up to produce a number of television and film projects.

First up will be Witness to Yesterday, a 13-part television series hosted by Patrick Watson that will begin production in November. The series is scheduled to air on History Television in 1998 in Canada and in primetime on pbs in the u.s., thanks to a strong presale from Evergreen Releasing.

Also part of the Film Works/ Cinefile agreement is Inside Stories, a half-hour dramatic anthology series involving characters from Canada’s various ethno-cultural communities that will run on the cbc. Perfect Arrangement, a satirically edged romantic comedy written and directed by Sugith Varughese, is the first of several features the two companies say they will coproduce. Also on the slate are four projects with Newfoundland-born writer/director David Wheeler, including Five Minutes With a Stranger, a romantic thriller, and Mind, based on a Spider Robinson novel set in the Bay of Fundy.

‘Formalizing financial support from Film nb for Witness will take place soon,’ says Cameron, who feels the project is a good example of the type of production that can take place in New Brunswick because of the support of Sam Grana and his initiatives at Film nb.

Grana was part of ‘Competition or Collaboration: Finding Common Ground,’ one of the many interesting panels organized by Industry Series producer Heather MacLeod. Grana was joined by the other leaders of the four Atlantic provinces’ film development corporations along with Ralph Holt, Telefilm director, operations, Atlantic regions. The panelists were able to agree that Nova Scotia’s tax credit (the best in the country) should be harmonized to include all the provinces.