The Local Heroes International Film Festival in Edmonton wound up its 15th anniversary year with the sellout of the international premiere screening of Lyndon Chubbuck’s The War Bride, starring Molly Parker. However, some of the eight-day festival’s biggest moments came from further afield.

Bill Evans, the National Screen Institute’s director of festivals, says the appearance of cult filmmaker John Waters was a standout event in the festival. The show, called Shock Value, featured the director of Pink Flamingos ‘talking about his influences and his major obsessions and his philosophy of bad taste.’ Staged in the evening at a 500-plus-seat theatre, the event was standing room only.

Celebration of the festival’s anniversary included an event that brought together former staff, board members and others involved in the festival over the last decade-and-a-half. Former NSI executive director Jan Miller – who was instrumental in the festival’s inception – was honored before a screening of Australian film The Dish, which Evans says is ‘very much in the spirit of the idea behind Local Heroes: films that are smaller but with heart that tell a good story and reflect the community in which they were made like the original film Local Hero [which in part inspired the festival].’

Another veteran of the early years, Anne Wheeler, was in attendance for the screening of her film Marine Life. ‘She’s participated in various festivals as a panelist and for the first time ever we screened one of her films, ironically,’ says Evans.

At the other end of the spectrum, three emerging filmmakers who are part of Vancouver digital scene – James Dunnison, Reg Harkema and Carl Bessai – are working on a collaborative project called Bang!, for which each invented a character. Screened as a work-in-process at the festival, the film sparked what Evans calls ‘a very interesting discussion. The film is a way to experiment with how to tell a story with the new technology – how it was able to free you up.’

The final day of the week-long event saw a press conference announcing that the festival, which no longer has a formal connection to the NSI, will be taken over by the Edmonton International Film Festival Society. ‘A brand-new board was struck [late March] and received the endorsement of the NSI as the organization to take over Local Heroes in Edmonton,’ says Evans. *

-www.nsi-canada.ca