Tonight's a big night at the Leo Awards for The Green Chain's three leading ladies.
Jillian Fargey is nominated for "Best Supporting Performance by a Female
in a Feature Length Drama" for her amazing performance as Jenni Holm in The Green Chain. Jillian received an honourable mention from Women in Film & Television's for their Artistic Merit Award for her "riveting" performance as Jenni Holm in The Green Chain.
Tricia Helfer is nominated for her dominating "Lead Performance by a Female in a Feature Length Drama" for her role in "Walk All Over Me." Tricia was previously nominated for a Leo for her performance in an episode of "The Collector" written by The Green Chain's Mark Leiren-Young
And Babz Chula is nominated for "Best Guest Performance by a Female in a Dramatic Series" for her work in the much mourned CBC series, J-Pod.
Let's hope for a hat trick!
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Leos Celebrate The Women of The Green Chain
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Green Chain Goes Beachcombing With Jackson Davies
The Beachcombers is so iconic, that even if you never saw CBC’s long-running made-in-BC family drama you probably remember it anyway.
In 1990 I was lucky enough to interview actor Robert Clothier (aka the ever cranky Relic) about the final season of The Beachcombers – which wasn’t just Canada’s longest running series, but was challenging Bonanza for the title of longest running drama series ever. And even though I’d never been a fan of the show, his passion for it was so genuine that I found myself missing it desperately and furious at the Torontonians at CBC head office who’d taken a chainsaw to part of BC’s culture.
Jackson Davies (who played RCMP officer Constable Constable on The Beachcombers) has fought to revive the series ever since it left the airwaves and he helped produce two highly rated TV movies that reunited the surviving cast members – and introduced a new generation of stars, and viewers, to one of Canada's most mythic meeting places, Molly’s Reach and the not so mythical land of Gibsons, B.C.
When we launched The Green Chain podcast the idea was to get different perspectives on BC’s forests and it hit me that for a lot of people around the world, the image they have of our forests, our loggers and our trees comes from watching Nick, Relic, Jessie and Constable Constable fight their weekly battles over those drifting logs.
These days Jackson is teaching film at Capilano College and starring in The Producers at the Arts Club’s Stanley Theatre. I met Jackson at Listel O’Douls in downtown Vancouver to talk about the death of The Beachcombers, the death of real-life beachcombing and how the whole world came to Molly’s Reach.
Click here to check out the latest Green Chain podcast. Coming up on future episodes I'll be talking trees, faith and getting scared sacred with Velcrow Ripper.
- MLY
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Green Chain's LA Premiere! Sunday (May 18th)!
Okay, so I've avoided the word "mockumentary" in interviews about The Green Chain -- but please don't tell the lovely people at Mockfest in Los Angeles where the movie makes its LA premiere this Sunday at 3 pm at the Hollywood Vine Theatre -- 6321 Hollywood Blvd.
So why have I avoided the "m" word? Because The Green Chain is a lot of things, but This Ain't Spinal Tap... What's exciting about Mockfest is they get that doc style films don't have to be comedies to work.
If you're in Los Angeles be sure to check out our LA premiere.
And if you know someone in Los Angeles, be sure to send this their way!
Here's the scoop on Mockfest:
MOCKFEST 2008 FESTIVAL INFORMATION
MISSION & OBJECTIVE
Our mission is to showcase the best mockumentaries from around the world, gathering fans and filmmakers together to celebrate the beauty and brilliance of the mockumentary genre at the center of it all, Hollywood, California.
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
MOCKFEST is the first film festival solely devoted to the mockumentary, a groundbreaking film style capable of bending reality and shaping human perceptions. MOCKFEST features mockumentaries of all types and lengths, comedic, dramatic, and experimental, and will showcase works from the past, present and future. The festival's most highly prized characteristic in filmmaking is innovation. All films that are selected to appear at the 2008 festival will have that in common.
Mark
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The bloom of the enviro film.
If you're looking for an enviro-themed film, Katherine Monk at CanWest/Canada.com recommends The Green Chain -- along with eco-classics like An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car?, The Lorax and Blockade (which features the same cinematographer (Kirk Tougas) and sound designer (Gael MacLean) as The Green Chain).
The story includes an interview with The Green Chain's Mark Leiren-Young.
``The idea isn't to lecture people, but to have people identify with the characters and . . . open their eyes to the larger issues,'' said Mark Leiren-Young, the director of The Green Chain, a 2007 movie about the many facets of the forestry industry.
``The whole point of this movie is to get people talking about the real issues from an educated position. The dialogue goes nowhere when it devolves into ignorant blanket statements about which side is right and which side is wrong,'' said Leiren-Young.
``The best way to effect change is to bring all areas of the debate to the stage, and let the audience make their own decision. That way it's real because the viewer has internalized the argument and made it his or her own.''
Here's the full list of recommended eco-films...The Lorax (1972): There's no doubt Dr. Seuss moulded the minds of young people with his book, and later this TV adaptation, about a community that cut down all its valuable trees for profit, and later paid the environmental price.
If You Love This Planet (1982): Dr. Helen Caldicott's lecture to a group of college students about the dangers of nuclear war set the tone for most of the films that would follow by laying out in clinical terms our capacity for self- destruction. In this landmark award-winner from the NFB's Terre Nash, nuclear war is the trigger for environmental catastrophe, but its sheer sobriety in the face of a real threat seemed to permeate the popular psyche, and readjust our notions of public responsibility. A wave of anti-nuke sentiment followed.
An Inconvenient Truth (2006): Davis Guggenheim proved the power of a lecture captured on screen once more with this surprisingly dramatic examination of climate change via Al Gore. Thanks to Al Gore's recent Nobel Prize co-win, this Oscar-winning film will forever be seen as the tipping point in the environmental movement, as well as a genre hallmark.
Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006): Chris Paine's little movie is about the little car that could: the General Motors all-electric EV1, a zero-emissions vehicle that was introduced into California as an experiment in the late 1990s, and later destroyed by GM when it appeared the car - if mass-produced - had the potential of eliminating every service station in the state because it needed no gas or maintenance. The film is raw but it's personal, and proves what one person with an idea, some passion, and a camera can accomplish.
Manufactured Landscapes (2007): Jennifer Baichwal records Edward Burtynsky's photographic landscapes as they're being created, and shows us industrial ugliness in a different light. By revealing the poetry in the pictures, she proves how mankind has the capacity to redeem itself - even in the face of industrial horrors.
The Unforeseen (2007): Laura Dunn takes on a familiar story of developers vs. environmentalists and turns it into a meditative study on how we live, and how we choose to house ourselves.
Rivers and Tides (2001): Though not an environmental movie on its surface, this documentary about environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy redefines the way we perceive the natural world by making it into physical art objects.
Garbage Warrior
Blockade
Flow: For Love of Water
Fields of Fuel
The 11th Hour
Planet in Peril
The Future of Food
Everything's Cool
Idiocracy
The Simpsons Movie
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
Darwin's Nightmare
The Green Chain
Saturday, April 19, 2008
The Green Chain "Heralded" for Earth Day
You know Earth Day has gone mainstream when The Calgary Herald is covering it. Yes, that would the same Calgary where they keep all the oil money...
Sure, the headline is about "cashing in" on the environmental movement but still... The story's on the cover of today's entertainment section, complete with a photo of Alberta's own Tricia Helfer. Calgary Herald writer (and author of The White Guy) Stephen Hunt wrote an extensive Earth Day feature for today's paper that covers everything from a green-washing James Bond villain to ecorazzi.com, the Environmental Media Association and... The Green Chain.
Here's Hunt's take on The Green Chain and Local Anxiety...
For Vancouver-based writer and director and longtime environmentalist Mark Leiren-Young, whose film The Green Chain explores the issue of logging in B.C., the shift in the overall public attitude towards the environment has been pleasantly surprising: touring with his comedy group Local Anxiety across Canada in the early 1990s with a show that included political satire and environmentally-themed sketches, Leiren-Young discovered the rest of the country didn't share Local Anxiety's interest in the environment.
"As soon as we went out of Vancouver, we pretty much had to lose the environmental stuff," Leiren-Young says. "When we played Toronto, I remember our producer saying, 'Lose the stuff about the dolphins and the whales.' So we'd lose all the stuff about dolphins, whales and trees. It just didn't play there."
Leiren-Young and the rest of Local Anxiety taped a television special featuring their political satire in Toronto. Then they went back to B.C. and taped a TV special featuring their environmental material that they were (politely) asked not to perform in Toronto. The result was Greenpieces: An Eco-Comedy, which was broadcast on TV in parts of in Canada and a PBS station in San Diego, where it won an EarthVision award for excellence in environmental filmmaking.
Cut to 15 years later, and the stuff Leiren-Young and his merry band of B.C. satirists couldn't perform elsewhere has become part of the everyday lexicon of the nation.
"Literally, all the stuff we were doing in 1993 in Vancouver is suddenly relevant in 2008 in the rest of Canada," Leiren-Young says.
The greening of pop culture resulted in The Green Chain, (which features, among other's, Alberta's Tricia Helfer), receiving development funding from Telefilm. According to Telefilm's John Dippong, a film such as The Green Chain, which deals with logging by showing both sides of the debate in fictionalized monologues, demonstrates the sort of maturation in the approach filmmakers have made in films discussing environmental themes.
"It basically looks at the whole issue of logging from all sorts of different perspectives," says Dippong of the film, which reaped a best canadian screenwriting nomination from the Writers Guild of Canada for Leiren-Young. "It's really nicely done, because there's no obvious right, wrong or single point of view, which of course is the whole deal with environmental films: it's complicated. Which is interesting."
Dippong sees the increased interest in environmental themes as a logical extension of western Canadian-based filmmakers' sense of place.
"It's kind of dangerous to generalize, but I think western Canadian filmmakers have a pretty distinctive sense of place and environment," Dippong says. "Whether it's the vast open prairies, the mountains, (or) the West Coast here, I think we're starting to see that the environment we live in is starting to influence the stories we tell."
Monday, April 14, 2008
Mr. Leiren-Young Goes to Ottawa
My Joust with Senators over Free Speech in Film
Jitters, the F word, and what I told the Bill C-10 hearings.
Published: April 14, 2008
TheTyee.ca
[Editor's note: To read the full transcript of the Senate panel discussion during the session Mark Leiren-Young spoke in, click here. His comments begin about half way down.]
The nice people at the Book and Periodical Council wanted me to be as well behaved as possible. The nice woman from the CBC really wanted me to say "fuck" on TV. And what the f*** were the senators going to say?
For the rest of the story... visit The Tyee...Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Green Chain Filmmaker to Talk Censorship With The Senate
Mark Leiren-Young is "briefing" the Senate today (Wednesday, April 9 at 5 pm Eastern Time) on a provision in Bill C-10 that could lead to the censorship of Canadian film and television.
Mark's speaking to the Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce on behalf of the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council of Canada.
This controversial clause in Bill C-10 won't affect The Green Chain, but it could affect the next movie or TV show that you try to make, so if you'd like to know what it's all about, here's the Facebook site Keep your censoring hands off of Canadian film and TV! No to Bill C-10! -- which now has over 38,000 members.
And if you're concerned about free speech in Canada, please join the Facebook group, send a letter to the Senate or call, write or email your MP.
Mark is presenting his brief between 5 and 6 pm (Eastern Time) and the Senate hearings are being streamed live on-line, so you can click here to watch. Other groups speaking today include REAL Women of Canada and Canadians Concerned about Violence in Entertainment (from 4-5 pm). The Canadian Conference of the Arts and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association will be speaking during the same session as the BPC, from 5-6.
Thursday's speakers include Sarah Polley and Wendy Crewson, who are speaking on behalf of ACTRA, and Rebecca Schechter and Maureen Parker from the Writer's Guild of Canada.
The Book and Periodical Council is the umbrella organization for Canadian associations involved in the writing, editing, publishing, manufacturing, distribution, selling and lending of books and periodicals in Canada. The members represent approximately 6,000 individuals and 5,500 firms and institutions. Associate members represent an additional several thousand individuals, firms and institutions.
The Freedom of Expression Committee monitors censorship issues in Canada, organizes Freedom to Read Week and produces an information kit each year on issues of intellectual freedom.
Mark first got involved with the FOE committee in 1992 when his comedy troupe, Local Anxiety, wrote the anthem for Freedom to Read Week, "Dirty Books."
He has represented the Playwrights Guild of Canada on FOE (and been part of their "issues" subcommittee) for so long that no one's quite sure when he officially joined.
