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Vancouver Island’s film community is alive and well.
The third-annual Vancouver Island Short Film Festival was a huge success, with two amazing crowds enjoying twenty-one incredible short films over two nights.
“It was a spectacular night,” said Johnny Blakeborough, festival co-organizer. “We expected a good turnout in our third year, but things went even better than we hoped. We had almost 500 people turn out to the Malaspina Theatre, we put on a great show and got a great response from the crowd. This was the best festival we have done”
Awards were given out in seven categories at the end of the second evening.
de Villiers van Zyl won the Best Film prize for his short “Sticks & Stones” a compelling documentary about a homeless man living in Winnipeg. “Sticks & Stones” also won the award for Best Technical Production.
Graham Stark and Kathleen de Veere won the Best Writing Award for their short comedy “Eyewitness Accounts”, which shows an event at a shopping mall from many perspectives. Stark is the creative force behind LoadingReadyRun.com, a Victoria based website that films and posts a new movie once a week every week and has done so for the past 4 years. Last year, they also won the Best Writing award. In 2006 they won Best Writing, Best Performance and the People’s Choice Award.
Local Actress Niccole Nattrass won the Best Performance Award this year for her very funny role in “Brownie Points” a dialogue originally written for the stage about the world’s oldest living brownie.
The Best Original Music award went to Simon Berman for the movie “Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat”, a psychedelic, experimental film that started off the show.
This year a new category was created to help foster local filmmakers - Best Student Film. Chad Schroter-Gillespie won the award for his black and white experimental film “Bad Brownie”. Chad is a Malaspina Media Studies student and hopes to have a career in film.
The Festival took place on January 18th and 19th at the Malaspina University-College Theatre.
The Vancouver Island Short Film Festival is a Nanaimo Arts Council event. For more information, please contact admin@visff.com or 729-3947.