WHITEHORSE - The inaugural Yukon International Film Festival came to a close Sunday having achieved its goal of bringing together a range of filmmaking talent for networking, dealmaking and even falling in love with the territory.
Anita Doron, whose film The End of Silence was named best feature at this year's Canadian Filmmakers Festival, had been planning to shoot her next project in northern Alberta. "But now I want to shoot it in the Yukon," she said.
Based on Richard Van Camp's novel The Lesser Blessed, the film is set in the Northwest Territories. Doron had hoped Alberta could stand in, but "I want to be as authentic as possible to the northern landscape and the architecture, and I just fell in love with the place and the people. Their collective desire to create something there really inspired me."
Les Harris, a producer with Canamedia in Toronto, rattled off several projects conceived over the five-day gathering in Whitehorse. He plans to turn Yukon filmmaker Ross Burnet's environmental documentary Ernie's Earth: Room to Roam into a 13-part TV series, and said Allan Code's CANOL, a 45-minute doc about a failed Arctic oil pipeline project, "could be a PBS Frontline." The fascinating film suffers from too few interview subjects -- which, Harris discovered, was due to lack of funds, not vision. He hopes to track down some of the workers who built the mega-project in the '40s and add their voices to the film.
Relaxing between meetings at the Klondike Inn, the festival's official hotel, Harris said this was his best experience in a long history of festival-going. "I was just made to feel so incredibly welcome. And I'm going to give back by helping."
Doron was similarly charmed: "They pampered us from the moment we arrived. They were so genuine and so excited, it was very infectious."
Natural beauty and the kindness of strangers were readily apparent to both filmmakers and media. Amanda Leslie, the festival's media liaison, acted as ambassador and frequent taxi driver to the reporters in attendance. She accompanied the media on the White Pass and Yukon Route rail line, which takes visitors through a picturesque mountain pass to the Pacific port town of Skagway, Alaska. Producers were also aboard for location scouting, and were treated to a Yukon River cruise and a flight over the Kluane ice fields in the southwestern corner of the territory.
In addition to being intimate and low-key, industry panels and networking events took advantage of the near-constant daylight of the Yukon summer, where the midnight sun dissuades people from turning in early.
