A still from Charles Officer’s film Unarmed Verses, which focuses on a 12-year-old girl in a Toronto community arts program.
Director Charles Officer’s documentary Unarmed Verses was voted winner of TIFF’s 17th annual Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival People’s Choice Award. The documentary, which won best Canadian documentary feature last year at Hot Docs, was selected from the festival’s 10-feature lineup. Officer spent over a year documenting Francine Valentine, a sensitive and curious adolescent, as she discovers the power of her own voice in a songwriting and recording program run by the grassroots community-building organization Art Starts. Established in 2001, the ten-day festival is one of the largest and longest-running showcases of Canadian film, and featured public screenings of the year’s best Canadian feature films, with guest appearances by Alanis Obomsawin and Evan Rachel Wood. (Press release)
Artist-Run Centres and Collectives of Ontario has awarded two arts administrators for their contributions to artist-run culture. Daniella Sanader is the recipient of its emerging cultural leader award. The Toronto-based writer is Gallery TPW’s installation and communications coordinator. She holds an MA in art history from McGill University, and has written essays and reviews for Canadian Art, C Magazine and BlackFlash, among others, and has curated projects for Vtape and Oakville Galleries. Executive director of Le Labo Centre for Francophone Media Arts of Toronto Barbara Gilbert is the recipient of the ARCCO achievement award. Gilbert is a Toronto-based artist, curator and educator who has exhibited in Canada, Europe and Australia. She has organized arts training workshops at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, and she facilitated adult education courses as the coordinator of the Ontario Art Galleries Association Secretariat, and at the College of Art & Design in Ontario. (Press release)
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is the 2018 recipient of the Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship, the Sundance Film Festival announced earlier this week. For three years the annual fellowship, named in honour of the late Māori filmmaker Merata Mita, has awarded an Indigenous filmmaker from a global pool of nominees with a cash grant and mentorship support, including a trip to the Sundance Film Festival. Tailfeathers is a filmmaker, writer and actor from Vancouver, and recipient of the Vancouver Mayor’s arts award. She recently directed a feature-length documentary, c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city, in collaboration with the Musqueam First Nation, and is currently directing a feature-length documentary about the opiate crisis and addiction in her home community of Kainai First Nation (Blood Reserve). (Sundance)
Power Plant director Gaëtane Verna will be presented with the insignia as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) at a bestowing ceremony tonight. Kareen Rispal, ambassador of France to Canada, says of Verna: “Through her responsibilities in leading cultural organizations, Gaëtane Verna has shared the work and insight of artists from all over the world. A Francophone and Francophile, she has developed partnerships with major French institutions, and programmed and produced large-scale exhibitions with renowned French artists.” (Press release)
The National Gallery of Canada’s Canadian Photography Institute has received a gift of 635 photographs by American photographer Paul Strand, the NGC announced yesterday. Strand mastered a repertoire of styles from Pictorialism to abstraction and documentary, and this donation means that the CPI now has the most significant holdings of Strand photographs in Canada. The gift was made by three Canadian donors and covers the photographer’s entire career, representing both major periods of his work: the mid-century photographs he shot throughout the US, and photographs he went on to take all over the world in the 1950s and ’60s. (Newswire)
