About a year ago, Toronto-based John Greyson and Phyllis Laing of Winnipeg attended the Local Heroes Canadian Film Festival in Winnipeg, and in the course of the customary festival meeting and greeting started talking about making a film together. This year the festival will screen that film, The Law of Enclosures, produced through Buffalo Gal Pictures and Pluck Pictures.

‘Hooking up filmmakers, networking, creating productions — it’s what we’re looking forward to doing and it seems to be working,’ says James Borsa, publicist for the National Screen Institute – Canada, which presents the Local Heroes festival.

Winnipeg will again be the site for the third annual Local Heroes Canadian Film Festival, to be held Feb. 25 to March 4. An offshoot of the nsi’s Local Heroes International Film Festival, taking place in Edmonton for the 15th year March 16-23, the Winnipeg venue differs from its parent festival in that it offers Canadian films exclusively.

‘The Canadian film angle makes us unique. We felt that there is no Canadian film festival in Canada, just Canadian films. That’s the need we [fill],’ says Borsa.

In the festival’s first year, international films were also shown, but last year organizers decided to go 100% Canuck. ‘We liked the turnout,’ says Borsa, who expects bigger crowds this year.

The program of six long-form offerings chosen by the nsi includes four shot in and around Winnipeg. ‘It’s an absolutely deliberate slant,’ says Borsa. ‘People will get to check out things shot in and around town; it will add some excitement. I think it’s an exciting angle; having these features will definitely draw the crowds in.’

The festival’s sole Canadian premiere, Sundance screener Hey, Happy, produced by Laura Michalchyshyn and Noam Gonick (who also directed) of Winnipeg’s Big Daddy Beerguts, concerns the illegal rave scene of Winnipeg on the verge of a deluge. Mongrel Media is distributing

Other Winnipeg-shot films are heist-film Kanadiana from Winnipeg’s Jon Einarsson Gustafsson; Desire, which concerns a relationship set against a backdrop of serial kidnappings, from prodco Subjective Eye of Salt Spring Island, bc (distributor, Remstar); and The Law of Enclosures, which simultaneously tells the story of both the beginning and the end of a relationship (Odeon Films).

The two non-Winnipeg films are Ginger Snaps from Toronto’s Water Pictures (TVA International) and Violet from St. John’s prodco Dark Flowers (Odeon).

The lineup also includes 30 short films.

Master classes will be led by Don McKellar, John Greyson, Niv Fichman, Colleen Murphy and Damon D’Oliveira.

*Local Heroes touchdown

The Grey Cup of 1989 was a landmark event in the life of many a prairie boy in the same way the shooting of John F. Kennedy and the death of Princess Diana were for a larger audience. In 1989, the province’s beloved gridiron football team the Roughriders made it to the Grey Cup for the first time in more than two decades.

‘In Saskatchewan, this specific Grey Cup is the stuff of legend,’ says writer/producer Craig Courtice. ‘People know where they were [when they heard the result].’

This history-making event forms the backdrop for Rider Pride from Courtice and Tony Hrynchuk, one of six team winners of the National Screen Institute – Canada’s Drama Prize last year. The hero of the 11-minute short (played by comedian Brent Butt) wants nothing more than to get home and watch his tape of the match without hearing the score first.

‘It was a back-and-forth game. There were some incredible moments,’ says Courtice. ‘The game was on the line at the very last second – it swung on a field goal. What made the victory the sweetest was the tension of it.

‘Saskatchewan is a very long-suffering province of bitter cold. It’s a have-not province. The Riders fan base is legendary. They supported the team through mostly thin.

‘Saskatchewan is the birthplace of socialism in Canada. It’s the kind of place that’s very community-minded and the Roughriders are one of the only community-owned teams in Canada. It’s a very heartening thing; it’s nice to see people that impassioned and it brings the province together. There are only one million people in the province, but they support a professional football team, meaning people drive two, three, four hours to get to a game.’

Courtice and Hrynchuk had already made a short, The Hick, when they decided to put Rider Pride together specifically for the Drama Prize contest. The script, ‘written-to-order,’ says Courtice, was completed in November 1999, awarded the prize in February 2000 and shot in October 2000.

Winners of the Drama Prize, usually six teams comprised of writers, directors and producers, are chosen with the help of a jury of industry professionals. The winners are announced at the Local Heroes Canadian Film Festival gala immediately following the premieres of the previous year’s winning films. Winners then train alongside professionals in their area (writing, direction or production) and ultimately get their films made.

(For those who can’t stand the suspense, the Roughriders won the game 43-40 over Hamilton.)

*Cry of the Wild

Late 2000 saw a filmmaker from the Northwest Territories make quite an impression at the World Conference of Climate Change in The Hague. Terry Woolf of Yellowknife-based prodco Lone Woolf was in Holland for the world premiere of his documentary Sila Alangoktok – Inuit Observations On Climate Change.

‘It was one of largest climate-change conferences, over 20,000 people at one conference,’ says Woolf.

Sila Alangoktok, which translates as ‘the climate is changing’ in an Inuit language, chronicles changes in the climate observed by Inuit inhabitants of Sachs Harbour in Banks Island, in the Beaufort Sea, a region in the Arctic Circle.

‘What we wanted was to show the effect of climate change on one area of the world. This documentary did exactly what it was intended to do. People were amazed at what they were seeing,’ says Woolf.

In pursuit of their story, Woolf and his crew spent last year engaged in four distinct shoots, one for each season, during which they observed, says the filmmaker, ‘a lot of major changes.’

‘Part of the reason we did that project [in Sachs Harbour] was because it’s been impacted most by climate change.’

The local inhabitants, although sheltered in conventional housing and in many ways living a conventional life, do supplement their diets with seal.

‘People who live up there used to hunt seal in late spring. Now there’s no pack ice in the summer.

‘It is directly impacting the island. The island is permafrost, which is permanently frozen mud, grit and ice, and whole sections of the shoreline and inland are thawing and melting and slumping. The ground is melting under them. Banks along the shore of the ocean are collapsing into the oceans. In some instances, whole lakes have disappeared.’

‘Their way of life is very close to the land and they spend a lot of time hunting. [Climate change] is changing the when and how they do go out on the land. The modes of travel have altered drastically for them: in spring you had open water between pack ice and could travel quite far in open boats and shelter in the pack ice. With no pack ice it’s rougher, you won’t go out as far in the rougher swells.

‘These isolated incidents are indicative of major change. In fish nets they’re catching salmon now which never used to be up there. In that area of the Arctic the change was more obvious than in other places.

‘They were getting thunder storms up there, which they had never seen before, which for some of the elders is quite strange.’

In the film, the accounts of inhabitants are supplemented by various scientific sources, including a study done on the area and scientists brought along on each shoot. ‘We had climatologists, biologists, all different ‘ologists,’ ‘ says Woolf.

‘What the documentary wanted was Iniut observations, observations from those who weren’t scientists. The scientists were there to record data from these people and to try to record traditional knowledge and local knowledge into the stuff they were observing.’

The shoot started in spring 1999, winding up a year later, with the Hague conference in November providing a handy delivery date.

Funding came from some unusual sources such as the Climate Change Action Fund and the Gordon Foundation as well as from territorial government sources.

The doc, which is set for broadcast in Canada on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, is available in two versions: a 14-minute version ‘to show to scientists and decision makers’ and a 42-minute version for broadcast.

A distributor is being sought.