22nd Atlantic Film Festival. (Festival Wraps).

9/13-21/02

Halifax-based director Thom Fitzgerald and Toronto-based Cape Breton writer/actor/filmmaker Daniel MacIvor were the two big winners at this year's Atlantic Film Festival (AFF). The AFF itself bounced back from last year's post 9/11 difficulties to gain a 28 per cent increase in audiences while unspooling a record 16 feature films from the region.

The festival kicked off with a strange kind of homecoming for American documentarian and activist Michael Moore. His controversial film Bowling for Columbine opened this years AFF, as it was produced by Halifax's own Salter Street Films. Moore's visit to Halifax (his second, after premiering his America-invades-Canada-comedy Canadian Bacon almost a decade ago) saw the popular contrarian generously taking questions on the film for more than 45 minutes, delighting the sold-out audience. The film went on, unsurprisingly, to win the People's Choice Award, the only award voted on by the audiences themselves.

Both Thom Fitzgerald's film, The Wild Dogs, and Daniel MacIvor's Past Perfect, were part of imX producer Chris Zimmer's innovative low-budget program of feature films by emerging directors. The series, entitled Seats 3A and 3C, is tied together by the narrative conceit of two strangers meeting on a plane and telling each other their respective stories. Shot on digital-video (DV) tape and budgeted at under a million dollars each, the series' films include Tricia Fish's comedy dragonwheel (which received its own sold-out screening) and three films either in production or planned for later in 2002 or 2003.

In fact, the number of DV-shot features at this year's AFF reached unparalleled levels. Whether it was Will Fraser's $4,000 black-and-white downtown Halifax drama Dying Fall, or Dorris Dorrie's latest German comedy Erleuchtung Garantiert, the DV revolution seems to be growing in strength and intensity. The 2002 Atlantic Film Festival was also very strong on nonfiction offerings. Noted First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin returned to this year's AFF (after last year's complete retrospective held at the Dalhousie Art Gallery) to premiere her new feature-length documentary Is the Crown at War with Us? The film detailed the confrontations at Burnt Church over the last two years between Mi'kmaq fishermen and federal officials in the wake of the Marshall decision on First Nations fishing rights. Moncton filmmaker Hermenegilde Chiasson treated the same subject from the Acadian point of view in his film Ceux Qui Attendant "Those Who Wait". Both works covered much ground lost in the rather shrill media reportage o n the subject, particularly the long, peaceful and very productive relationship between the Acadians and the Mi'kmaq that reaches back to 1604.

Fredericton's Errol Williams delivered one of the festival's most talked-about documentaries with his film When Voices Rise... .

A feature-length portrait of how segregation came to an end in Bermuda, it briefly illuminated an often forgotten corner of North American, showing that the American South has no monopoly on gripping race-relations stories. New Brunswick continued its strong showing this year with one the the strongest feature dramas ever to made in the province. Tim Southam's

The Bay of Love and Sorrows, adapted from and co-scripted with the acclaimed Miramichi novelist David Adams Richards, was a powerful and deeply moving film about how class can ultimately trump loyalty in the rural Maritimes. By far the most effective screen adaptation of any Richards work, The Bay of Love and Sorrows ranks with the finest naturalistic dramas of this or any year.

Ultimately, however, it was Thom Fitzgerald's and Daniel MacIvor's year. Fitzgerald's The Wild Dogs, shot in Bucharest, Romania, draped in the relentless beige tones of a still-decaying Eastern Europe, was perhaps the most purely cinematic of all the films at the festival. With Fitzgerald himself playing the lead as a Canadian porn merchant in search of new, cheap talent as the city effects a cull of the wild dogs of the title, the film takes some astonishing risks with subject matter and approach, particularly when dealing with issues of sex and commerce.

MacIvor, who won Best Actor for his appearance in his own film Past Perfect while picking up another award for writing the adaptation of his play Marion Bridge for the screen for director Weibke von Carolsfeld, expressed a longing to return to Nova Scotia permanently. Having presented two plays here this year (Cul De Sac and In on It) and armed with another script to be shot here next year, MacIvor might just get his wish. Meanwhile Fitzgerald's latest film, The Event, is in post-production, raising the possibility that the acting! writing! directing duo may well be in contention for the very same prizes at next year's Atlantic Film Festival.