West coast (18th Vancouver International Film Festival).

The 18th Vancouver International Film Festival finished on a high note with new records being set for both attendance and revenues. Local and Western Canadian filmmakers were honoured more than ever before by the audiences and juries at the festival. Vancouver director Scott Smith saw his roller-coaster take the Federal Express Award for Most Popular Canadian Film, followed closely by Stephen Reynolds's, The Divine Ryans. Winnipeg writer/director Terrance Odette was honoured by the Canadian Images jury for Heater, which captured both the Rogers Award for Best Western Canadian Screenplay (worth a high-end computer and software package) and the Telefilm Canada Award for Best Emerging Western Canadian Feature Film Director (a $5,000 prize). Local directors Michelle Ryan and Jessica Salo won the Telefilm Canada Award for Best Emerging Director of a Western Canadian Short (worth $4,000) for their Pride.... Kudos go to the Trade Forum for a superb selection of seminars that were the buzz of the festival's middle weekend. The most popular seminar was Next Wave president Peter Broderick's presentation on digital filmmaking, a presentation that had the Luddites quaking in their boots while exciting the hell out of everybody else. Even the fiercely intelligent veteran cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), in town for a Trade Forum seminar, was completely convinced of the inevitability of digital domination. He called Broderick his new "guru" while devoting most of his talk to the sea change that is set to occur and commiserating with the cinematographer purists in the audience.... Production is still humming in and around Vancouver with seven features, six TV movies and mini-series and 14 TV series currently shooting. While many people may be interested in How to Kill Your Neighbour's Dog, executive produced by Robert Redford and starring Kenneth Branagh (a fixture on the local late-night hot spot scene), Robin Wright-Penn and Lynn Redgrave, or Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars with Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle, what has the less Hollywood-centric among us interested is Lynne Stopkewich's long-awaited follow-up to Kissed. Suspicious River is set for a five-week shoot beginning in mid-November. I ran into Lynne at a local watering hole recently and she was pretty quiet about the project, although she let on that Molly Parker will star and that cinematographer Greg Middleton (whose work on Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses was one of the few redeeming factors in an otherwise empty exercise) is on board. Let's keep our fingers crossed.