Winnipeg: The third round of the Local Heroes Canadian Film Festival in Winnipeg was a roaring success, with daily jam-packed sessions and the festival’s first-ever feature film sellout with closing film Hey Happy!

The six-day festival (Feb. 25 to March 4) got off to a good start, with the National Screen Institute’s Local Exposure Amateur Movie Contest prize and the $500 People’s Choice Award going to The Get Down Gang, one of 12 five-minute film finalists screened on Local Heroes opening night. The same day saw the NSI’s Movie Camp projects – short films made by Manitobans aged 13 to 19 – make their screen debuts.

The Drama Prize winners from last year’s Local Heroes premiered their films at the Garrick Theatre where the filmmakers behind gridiron-flavored short Rider Pride threw toy footballs into the audience.

This year’s Drama Prize winners, who will be presenting their films at the 2002 Local Heroes, were announced immediately following the presentation.

Hailing from Halifax, Vancouver and Edmonton, the winners are: For My Father (writer, Tim McAree; producer, Erin Haskett; director, Luke Carroll), North Grove (writer, Irwin Barker; producer, Deborah D. Bose; director, Mark O’Callaghan), Quality Viewing (writer/ director, Evan Kelly; producer, Dugald McLaren), The Big Table (wirter/director, Alexandra Zarowny; producer, Larissa Banting) and The Wedding Video (writer/ director, Jay Dahl; producer, Adamm Liley).

The first speaker in the Lunch with a Canadian Hero series, Laszlo Barna of Toronto’s Barna-Alper Productions, recalled life before television: "I was a good standup comic. The audience sucked." From there he said he became "the worst soundman in Canada" and subsequently a director, a job he took because it meant remembering only two words: "action" and "cut." One day, he recalled, he forgot half his lines (the word "cut" eluded him) and his actors continued walking into the distance while the crew packed up and headed in the other direction.

He recalled his days in Vancouver doing radical street theatre puppetry with Chris Haddock, now his partner, more than 20 years later, in the Gemini-winning series DaVinci’s Inquest.

Another Canadian Hero, Jay Firestone, CEO of Fireworks Entertainment, had one principal piece of advice for young filmmakers: "Hustle, hustle, hustle. You do not let up, you use every connection you can, be in their face. Talent wins out in the end but you have to get noticed."

The same applies to films, said Firestone. "It’s all about marketing. I have to spend $1.5 million marketing a $500,000 film. You can’t do anything for $500,000. The big problem with distribution is that artwork and trailers cost the same [regardless of the project’s budget]. You can’t say Canada has only 10% of the population [of the U.S.] so you spend 10% of the money. You have to buy a lot of ads."

Attracting plenty of notice was local filmmaker Noam Gonick’s Sundance screener Hey Happy!, shot and set in Winnipeg. The hometown premiere was a sellout, with an estimated 100 people turned away at the door.

Gonick, already in development on his next feature Stryker, also set and to be shot in Winnipeg, says he has no plans to relocate either east or south. "There’s nowhere else I’d rather be." *

-www.nsi-canada.ca