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VIFF 2009

Vancouver International Film Festival Winners!

The jury for the Canadian Images program awarded the inaugural Canwest Award for Best Canadian Feature Film and its $20,000 cash prize to director Xavier Dolan of Montreal for I KILLED MY MOTHER (J’ai tué ma mere). The winner was selected from 19 films in competition.

The Canadian Images jury has awarded a $2,000 cash award to directors Jan Binsse and David Tougas of Montreal for their film THE LAST ACT (Le dernier acte). The competition was open to first-time filmmakers.
65 Red Roses (Canada/BC) directed by Nimisha Mukerjee and Philip Lyall, won the NFB’s Most Popular Canadian Documentary award. And, Women in Film & Television Vancouver presented its Artistic Merit Award toNimisha Mukerji, co-director, producer and editor, and Gillian Lowry, co-producer, of 65 RED ROSES.
SOUNDTRACK FOR A REVOLUTION (USA), directed by Bill Guttentag, has won the Rogers People’s Choice Award. All of the festival’s 377 films – dramas and nonfiction, short, mid- and feature length – were eligible.
The audience chose FACING ALI (Canada/BC), directed by Pete McCormack for the second annual documentary Audience Award for most popular nonfiction film.
AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (USA), directed by Dan Stone, has won the VIFF Environmental Film Audience Award.

EIGHTEEN WINS VIFF DRAGONS & TIGERS AWARD FOR YOUNG CINEMA

The Festival has announced EIGHTEEN directed by JANG Kun-Jae of South Korea has won the 16th annual Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema and a cash prize of $10,000.

 

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INTERVIEW with Zombies of Mass Destruction’s director Kevin Hamedani and lead actor Doug Fahl by Willis Wong

An October 5th Interview with ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction director Kevin Hamedani (photo above) and lead actor Doug Fahl at the Vancouver International Film Festival by Willis Wong for Intermedias Review.

Wong:  You’re obviously a great fan of zombie movies—ZMD references Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive”, Romero’s “Dead” films, Boyle’s “28 Days Later”—what came first, zombie movie or political satire?

Hamedani:  Political satire.  I wanted to discuss my experiences post 9/11 and at first I actually wrote a serious  script that wasn’t even a horror film at all and I just wasn’t feeling it. At that time I had already made a few serious semi-autobiographical low budget films.  I was done with that and felt like doing something a little bit more fun, so just one morning over breakfast with a friend, talking, the idea of terrorists and a virus and zombies [came up]; at that time it was the terrorists that actually caused the problem.

W:  You’ve made the most of your budget, throwing in one gag and one gore scene after another, there’s a throwaway man-on-fire in the background, there’s a lot of post-production CG.  Was the filming pace frantic?

H:  Yes.  It was intense and insane, not enough time.

W:  Was there time to ad-lib?

H: Oh yeah, Cooper Hopkins, who played Lance–I had worked with him since high school. Actually we did plays together and he improvised a lot during my stage work, so I trusted him in doing that on film. A couple of funny lines are improvisations, and we improvised certain gags.
W: With the level of craziness post 9/11 and especially after the election of a black president, was it tough to out-crazy present day politics?

H:  Well, what you have to do is go over the top. What was going on in the last eight years was so absurd that if we didn’t have an absurd film, it wouldn’t have been good enough as a satire about that period, kind of like “Doctor Strangelove”–’There’s no fighting in the war room’, all those little lines, the guy riding on the nuclear bomb–that was a reaction to the idea that we could actually kill ourselves with this one bomb and that was when people were actually starting to realize that.   The fact that Middle Easterners were being beaten up in cabs or stopped because of their last name, for me growing up being exotic pre-2001, ‘Oh you’re Persian–that’s so cool’, and then overnight, all of a sudden my neighbors who I grew up with stopped waving at me when I would drive home from work.  That to me was so unbelievable and so absurd that I knew the film had to go as far as it could in terms of the gore being just ridiculous because that represented the violence in the time.  I knew I had to make fun of everybody from the white characters to the Iranian characters because I thought everyone was at fault.

W:  Right, nothing’s sacred, even the schoolteacher turns into Rambo.

H:  Yeah, she turns into a conservative type, and that happens in politics.

W:  Well, speaking of gore, there’s the face-peeling and the eyeball-eating scenes–was there anything cut out, left on the cutting room floor because it was too over-the-top?

H:  There was a zombie eating a foetus.  If I didn’t have to compromise, it would be in there.

W:  There’s a comic book series that shares the same name that might be turned into a Hollywood movie down the road. Is there room for two “ZMDs”?

H:  No, you can’t have two films with the same title.  We contacted them because I wrote the script prior to that comic even existing.  The script was started in 2004 and we didn’t find out about the comic until post-production.  We  were editing and then every week we’d do the research to find out if anyone was talking about us and then we found out this comic existed.  Our lawyers contacted their lawyers saying, ‘We need to discuss this, one of us needs to change the name, let’s just sit down and talk about it’, and they didn’t contact us.  I think they thought we were like a mini-dv, little low budget in-your-backyard kind of film.  I think that they just thought not to bother, and we tried our best to contact them, so OK, we’re almost done with our film and this is the title we had from the very beginning, so we kept it.  We were even considering changing the title, so we were thinking of additional titles. We were open to all that but they didn’t even contact us so we’ll see what happens when their film comes out.

W to Doug Fahl:  How did you enjoy wielding a shotgun, blood splatters–was it a new experience?

Fahl:  Yeah definitely, the whole film-making experience was new.  That was my first film; I had previously done commercial work.  It was a complete blast.

W:  A total dive into the genre.

F:  Yeah, once I was cast I was a little nervous, like am I going to be able to do this action stuff, you know?

H:  Really?  You were nervous?

F:  Well, I mean a little bit.  I’m nervous on any project, like am I going to be able to pull this off convincingly?  But once I got on set and realized even though it’s fast paced, the pace is very slow.  You have plenty of time to prepare for your scene as you’re waiting around, but the gore, the blood, although it’s sticky and uncomfortable and cold, I enjoyed every minute of it.  Even waiting around for hours it’s exciting.

W:  Was the majority of the movie shot at night?  How did you handle the schedule?

H:  I love it.

F:  You just get used to it.  You’re all on the same schedule.  When they say it’s breakfast it’s really midnight and lunch is at 3 am.  The town, we shot at Port Gamble, one little block, and that became our home for a month so It just felt like the street was our hallway and the post office was our kitchen.  We had the run of the town and it was very exciting. You could take a stroll down the street, watch the shooting, go over to the graveyard and relax.

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)

Read here Wong’s ZMD review

WATCH HERE THE TRAILER

More VIFF’s 2009 reviews

Anarchic celebration of destruction

Watching “Trash Humpers” might make the viewer think they’ve stumbled across some senior citizen’s snuff film. Shot and edited with a hand-held video camera, the actors wear grotesque old-age masks and makeup, hunched over and shuffling like crippled denizens of a retirement home. But any resemblance to the feeble and aged ends there. Clip after clip show these “ancient” vandals infiltrating suburban America to smash household items, sodomize vegetation, defecate, and of course hump trash cans.  This is an anarchic celebration of destruction; the oldsters laughing and dancing in their mayhem, singing nursery rhymes of murder.  A freak show of outrageous characters are visited, including a joined-at-the-head Siamese twin and transvestite poet, each spouting a sometimes hilarious monologue or a civilization-destroying rant.  During a night time neighborhood drive one of the trash humpers remarks, “We choose to live like free people”, mocking the residents of the houses, soon to rise and prepare for work, as “A stupid way to live.”  The makers of “Trash Humpers” reflect a grisly, distorted mirror on our terminal civilization, firing a big middle finger to the world and the audience.

Trash Humpers
Directed by Harmony Korine
USA 2009

Trailer

Willis Wong

(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF 2009)