Halifax: The Atlantic Film Festival succeeded this year in fulfilling its Atlantic-content mandate, while also presenting some fine out-of-province and international work. With executive director Gregor Ash and festival director Lia Rinaldo at the helm, the growing festival also gave the event international credibility with its sixth annual Strategic Partners coproduction conference.

Although the festival, which ran Sept. 12-20, had to compete for attention with local boy Gary Beals’ pursuit of the Canadian Idol crown (and the Metro Centre was truly rocking on that fateful Tuesday night), it was on track for a record number of sold-out screenings over the course of its eight days (final numbers were not available at press time). Ash says it could still be bigger. He attended the Toronto International Film Festival prior to the AFF and was struck by how the city completely embraced the event. That’s what he hopes for Halifax, and says he is pleased to see support for the festival swelling annually.

This year’s highlights included screenings of Thom Fitzgerald’s The Event, which served as the opening gala, and Anita McGee’s The Bread Maker, which screened as the Atlantic gala.

‘It’s quite a community that comes together here every year, and to have my film as the Atlantic gala was quite an honor,’ says McGee, based in St. John’s, a longtime friend and contributor to the AFF. ‘The audience was with it all the way and it got a really good response. It feels like an achievement.’

Several other films left impressions on the AFF audience. Toronto’s Sudz Sutherland brought his funny and thoughtful Love, Sex and Eating the Bones to Halifax mere days after winning the award for best first Canadian feature at TIFF, and seemed pleased with the reaction of the Oxford Theatre’s patrons. Producer Marc Stephenson and director Nathaniel Geary brought On the Corner from Vancouver. Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Vincenzo Natali’s Nothing and Jason Young’s doc Animals also screened to strong praise.

The anniversary gala was Tom McCarthy’s quietly brilliant The Station Agent, while Isabel Coixet’s Canada/Spain copro My Life Without Me closed the festival.

The films are only part of what happens at this festival, however. There is as much ballyhoo surrounding the Strategic Partners conference.

Ralph Holt, director of operations for Telefilm Atlantic, and the national sector head for feature film, agrees. ‘Year upon year [Strategic Partners] has become more sophisticated in terms of conversations that are happening, delegations that are coming, and how attractive it is to producers from across Canada and internationally,’ he says.

Opportunity to grow

‘I think there is a real opportunity for Strategic Partners to grow significantly,’ Ash says. ‘We’ve gotten a lot of praise for the event and how the event is run and managed and I’d like to see it stand beyond the borders of those three days.’

Ash intends to continue working on audience growth and has some big ideas for what he’d like to see happen with the festival, which has already expanded with Strategic Partners, its children’s film fest Viewfinders and other events. But there are challenges that go with expansion. A big one is staffing.

‘Our problem was that aside from the three core staff, everyone else disappeared after the festival,’ says Ash.

The AFF received a couple of grants last year and now has nine fulltime staffers (which bumps to about 40 just before festival time), and this year Ash managed a small army of about 300 registered volunteers. So with the staff situation looking up, another important goal he hopes to achieve going forward is reconnecting with the Atlantic film community and audience, and to develop strategic partnerships for the festival. Already he has negotiated partnerships with the East Coast Music Association and the Acadian Film Festival in Moncton, among others, to ‘deliver something that is bigger than our whole,’ he says. ‘I’ve always said the festival is much bigger than the sum total of the bums in seats.’

On the awards front, The Event won for best direction, writing, art direction, editing and actress (Joan Orenstein) in the Atlantic categories, while Animals took the Rex Tasker Award for best doc, as well as the music composition and cinematography awards. Patrick Blackie won the best Atlantic short film award for Masquerade, while Ezra Krybus and Matthew Miller won best Canadian short for The School. David Hillier and Alex Salter won the best sound design prize, and Andy Jones won the best actor award for Andy Jones: To the Wall. My Life Without Me picked up the best Canadian film prize, while La Grande seduction took home the TMN People’s Choice Award.

-www.atlanticfilm.com