Manitoba film stars cast bright light on TIFF

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This article was published 12/09/2016 (3330 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — If the annual Manitoba Party at the Drake Hotel on Sunday had been all about the local films playing at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), it might have been a brief, low-key affair, since the only Manitoba film on the TIFF program was the bizarre, funny 10-minute short Imitations, from Winnipeg collective MarkusMilosIanFabian.

But it wasn’t a quiet night out at all. In fact, the open-air party, sponsored by Manitoba Film and Music and On Screen Manitoba on the second-floor courtyard of the Queen Street venue quickly filled to capacity Sunday night with a who’s who of Manitoba film.

The guests of honour — Milos Mitrovic, Ian Bawa, Fabian Velasco and Markus Henkel — of Imitations arrived directly at the party after putting in an appearance at the Midnight Madness party at The Citizen on King Street, in the company of one of the film’s stars Conor Sweeney, a veteran of the 2014 Midnight Madness film The Editorfrom another local film collective, Astron-6.

Sweeney is hilarious as a Justin Bieber-like pop star named Austin Kelsey, riding the wave of popularity on the strength of an appalling pop song titled 21-Year-Old Baby. (I complained to Sweeney about the insidious earworm quality of the song, terrible as it is. “Hey, I had to sing it for two straight days,” Sweeney said.) 

Bawa said the film was well-received at the TIFF Short Cuts screening on Friday, although he was unnerved it didn’t elicit constant laughter, which might have been too much to ask. It’s nevertheless a sharply satiric film about how celebrity worship can nullify the worshiper, as it does with Mitrovic’s character Arnold, who meets with disaster when he shows up to a karaoke night after enduring a surgical procedure to make him resemble his idol. 

• In an interesting crossover strategy, another Astron-6 member, Matthew Kennedy, credited as “Divorced Dad,” plays the host of the karaoke event. Sweeney explains the character is featured in Divorced Dad, a six-episode web series Kennedy and Sweeney are shopping around.

It’s a faux community access television show ostensibly about coping with divorce, except it tends to go off the rails in nightmarish ways, Sweeney explains.

• Jennifer Dale provided a bit of glamour to the party, showing up with Winnipeg filmmaker Shelagh Carter (Passionflower). The two are collaborating on a screenplay titled Into Invisible Light, inspired loosely by characters in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Dale says. Carter has finished her drama Before Anything You Say, a tale of conflict between a married couple inspired by an episode of her own life.

• Producer Ian Dimerman of Inferno Pictures, executive producer of locally shot films including Goon, was in shmooze mode, saying Inferno is prepping a prestige Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie to shoot in Manitoba this fall, but he is not ready to name specific stars or a title.

• Producer Juliette Hagopian was at the party, as was Andrea del Campo, one of the stars of the Hagopian-produced dark comedy Stegman Is Dead. (”I was here this weekend for a wedding,” del Campo said.) Hagopian says Stegman will be finished by October, in time to pitch it to the Sundance Film Festival in January.

• Marvin Kaye, former executive producer of the TV series Less Than Kind, was spotted chatting with all-grown-upLTK ingenue Brooke Palsson, who now lives in Toronto and, between acting gigs, is working on a recording career under the name “Nala.” Kaye, meanwhile, has returned to acting and has a role in the Guillermo del Toro’s new film The Shape of Water.

• Former political consultant and Corus Radio producer Dave Shorr worked the party, talking up a dream project, a TV series set in the world of radio titled FM Dial, a work he pitches as “Mad Men meets WKRP in Ronald Reagan’s America.”

The Toronto International Film Festival wraps on Sunday.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing