From an Academy Award winner to Degrassi Junior High, the Kingston Canadian Film Festival takes the idea of Canadian content to a whole new level.
The annual festival, now in its seventh year, features only Canadian content. In fact, the Kingston Canadian Film Festival is the largest exclusively Canadian film festival in the country.
Festival Director Alison Migneault said the strictly Canadian content of the festival benefits both filmmakers and movie-goers. “American films make up 98 per cent of what Canadian audiences see, so we’re trying to fill that void and provide audiences with Canadian films,” Migneault said in an interview with the Journal.
Migneault’s involvement with the annual festival started when she first volunteered five years ago.
“I started volunteering in a publicity position and fell in love with the event. I loved working on it and I loved the community feel and it just sort of grew from there,” she said.
Migneault, who studied communications at Brock University and Canadian studies at Carleton, said her academic work has played a large part in piquing her interest in the all-Canadian film fest.
“My undergraduate degree is in communications studies, which is the study of television, music, film and pop culture, so I took a lot of film courses in university. From an entertainment perspective, I’ve always really enjoyed going to films,” she said. “I really love the idea of helping people connect with films they might not have seen and deconstructing some of the myths surrounding Canadian films, like that they’re all sad or boring or that they were all made in the ’60s, and showing people how modern
and fun they can be.” This year’s festival features one of the most successful examples of modern Canadian filmmaking—the Degrassi television series, which in its various formats, has existed for
over 20 years.
Stefan Brogen, who played Snake in the original series, and Adamo Ruggiero, who plays Marco in the current Next Generation series, as well as co-creator and executive producer Linda Schuyler and production executive Shernold Edwards, will all be on hand at a free Degrassi workshop on Friday afternoon at Etherington Auditorium.
Other festival guests include Queen’s grads Wyeth Clarkson and Phillip Daniels, whose film Sk8 Life, a low-budget documentarystyle drama about the wild lifestyle of a bunch of skateboarders living in Vancouver, will be shown at the festival. lan King, a veteran documentary filmaker celebrating his 50th year in the industry and Jayne Eastwood, who stars in the film Snow Cake, will also be attending the festival.
Migneault said one of the things she was personally looking forward to at the festival is the showing of The Danish Poet, a Canadian film that just won Best Short Animation atthe Oscars last weekend.
Other films featured include a documentary about Arctic life and the threat posed to it by global warming, titled The White Planet: Who Loves the Sun, a coming-of-age drama about two boys whose friendship is torn apart by a girl.
When asked why people should attend a local film festival, Migneault makes a convincing argument.
“I think that people shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity that they have—not a lot of communities have film festivals. It’s a different experience from going to a traditional movie theatre. There’s a community feel, usually the audiences clap after the film and with all the guests and actors right there, you get a chance to dialogue with the filmmakers,” she said.
“That’s a really unique experience you don’t get unless you go to a film festival.”
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The Kingston Canadian Film Festival opens on Wednesday and runs to next Sunday. For a complete schedule, list of venues, workshop programs and ticket information, visit www.kingcanfilmfest.com.
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