Trevor Cornish, this year’s recipient of the First Cut Award, has only just hit the directing scene with less than two years experience and has never worked on a spot with a budget over $30,000. Proof positive that directors do not necessarily need big budgets to demonstrate their skill.

Judging Chairs:

Vancouver: More screenings meant a 10% increase in movie attendance at the 2002 Vancouver International Film Festival, which wrapped Oct. 11.

Directing a feature is like writing a novel and television like tackling a short story, but for Zach Math, directing commercials is pure poetry.

After wrapping a recent campaign for Canada Reconnect, it occurred to director Aubrey Singer that the talent could have put more of his head into it.

Telefilm Canada backed a record number of projects last year – putting $208.3 million into the production, development and marketing of 956 Canadian movies, television, new media and music. And although some new policies caused confusion and ruffled a few feathers, executive director Richard Stursberg says fiscal 2001/02 was ‘a good year.’

Michael Downing’s directing career took off when his first short film, Clean-Rite Cowboy, screened at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival and secured him a scholarship at the American Film Institute in L.A., where he started studying in the fall of that year.

Quebec director Alexandre Franchi’s imagination is a little hyperactive. As a kid he always wanted to bring his toys to life, now as a director he’s been able to make it happen.

Michel Coulombe is a TV and Web programmer with the SilenceOnCourt.tv platform and French-language arts channel ARTV.

With the First Cut Awards marking our annual celebration of the work of first- and second-year directors, OTS turned to Canadian agencies to ask: ‘What does a young director bring to a commercial production?’

Montreal: Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, a simple, impressionistic story of exile and village life on the African coast, is the winner of the Dvcolor $10,000 Louve d’Or prize for best feature film at the 31st Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media.

Union heads across the entertainment industry are optimistic that their first unified lobby effort will bring quick changes to policies at the CRTC and reverse the apparent slump in production of Canadian TV drama. The Canadian Coalition of Audiovisual Unions, which earlier this year submitted a policy paper to the federal regulator and Minister of Canadian Heritage Sheila Copps, has had some early success.