Actor Aleks Paunovic – AKA the “Big Guy” of the Vancouver film and television industry – returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to discuss the searing indie hit Chained , saying goodbye to Van Helsing after five triumphant seasons, the enduring appeal of post-apocalyptic film and television, and his 20-year friendship with actor Tahmoh Penikett. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA
Tahmoh Penikett has gained an international fan following for wildly different roles in an array of studio, network, and indie projects, including Battlestar Galactica (where he appeared as Karl “Helo” Agathon), Strange Empire , Dollhouse , Supernatural , Riftworld Chronicles , Bomb Girls , and The Sinners . The son of a politician and a residential school survivor, Tahmoh is passionate about Indigenous issues, which are a cornerstone of his social media use. He’s also renowned for his famous fr...
Tahmoh Penikett has gained an international fan following for wildly different roles in an array of studio, network, and indie projects, including Battlestar Galactica (where he appeared as Karl “Helo” Agathon), Strange Empire , Dollhouse , Supernatural , Riftworld Chronicles , Bomb Girls , and The Sinners . The son of a politician and a residential school survivor, Tahmoh is passionate about Indigenous issues, which are a cornerstone of his social media use. He’s also renowned for his famous fr...
Querencia is one of the very first women-driven, Indigiqueer romantic screen projects anywhere. APTN Lumi's first original series centres on the budding romance between two young Indigenous women – Abe, played by Mary Galloway, and Daka, played by Kaitlyn Yott – and follows them as they navigate and explore their complex Indigiqueer identities. Querencia was written and directed by Mary Galloway – critically acclaimed for her acting work in Never Steady, Never Still and her shorts Spirit Glitch ...
Andrea Brooks is beloved around the world for playing two characters that couldn’t be more dissimilar: scientist and assassin Eve Teschmacher on CW’s Supergirl , and the kind-hearted (and unlucky-in-love) Dr. Faith Carter on Hallmark’s When Calls the Heart . For years, Andrea moved back and forth between the two characters, sometimes on the same day. So how’d she do that? What does she think of her characters’ divergent choices, moral centers, and tastes in music? What really happened between Na...
Rachel Talalay is a film and television director and a producer. That’s how her Wikipedia entry opens, and while accurate, it fails to capture just how punk rock Rachel is, how entertaining her work is, and the myriad of emotions that work conjures up in people. Rachel’s work spans many genres, from horror films like Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare , to the seminal comic book film Tank Girl , to the dramatic film On The Farm , about the women who were preyed upon by serial killer Robert Pickt...
Kalinga (Care) is about the tens of thousands of women who leave the Philippines each year to work in Canada and other countries as nannies and caregivers. Since the 1970s, the Philippines has pursued aggressive labour-export campaigns, perhaps more so than any other country on Earth. It’s why we have the Live-in Caregiver Program in Canada, which has brought many Filipino women to Canada to work as nannies and caregivers. Often these women are mothers who must leave their children in the Philip...
Dead Man’s Switch: a crypto mystery and Into Light don’t appear to have much in common beyond the fact that both are currently streaming as part of the 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. Dead Man’s Switch: a crypto mystery is a heart-pounding documentary feature about Gerald Cotten, the CEO of Quadriga (which was at one time Canada’s largest crypto-currency exchange), whose sudden death in 2018 left a myriad of questions, chief among them: what happened to his investors’ 200 million dollars? I...
In the fourth episode of our #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry, actress and filmmaker Mayumi Yoshida ( The Man in the High Castle; Akashi ) discusses the racism she’s experienced in the industry, the devastating impact of on-screen stereotypes on Asian women, and why Asian Canadian films are Canadian films. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA
Anne Wheeler is a screenwriter, a director, a mentor, and a legend in the Canadian film and television industry. Her films include Bye Bye Blues , Loyalties , Better Than Chocolate , and Chi , and her growing television directing filmography includes Chesapeake Shores , Anne with an E , The Romeo Section , and Firefly Lane . She’s garnered seven honorary doctorates and an Order of Canada. But who was Anne before she was an icon? Anne brings us into her origin story in her new book, Taken by the ...
In this fascinating, funny, and emotional episode of the YVR Screen Scene Podcast, Sabrina is joined by two remarkable filmmakers who’ll premiere genre-bending sci-fi short films on May 1 as part of #Crazy8sFilms21: Tesh Guttikonda (director of Mom vs. Machine , about an Indian mom who must face off against an AI food replicator purchased by her gamer bro son; the film stars Nimet Kanji and Praneet Akilla) and Luvia Petersen (director of iDorothy , about a man who uses AI tech to bring his dead ...
Pascale Hutton is a bona fide genre-hopper, and the proof is in the work: as the beleaguered Juliana on Chris Haddock’s Intelligence , a role for which she won a Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Guest Role, to FBI Special Agent Abby Corrigan on Sanctuary (a role that required her to tangle with Abnormals and kick ass and also, famously, sing), to pilot Krista Ivarson on Arctic Ai r, and now to actress-turned-dress-store-clerk-to-who knows-what-else Rosemary Coulter on Hallmar...
Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor are the dynamite filmmakers behind Someone Like Me , a feature-length documentary that follows the parallel journeys of Drake, a gay asylum seeker from Uganda, and a group of strangers from Vancouver’s queer community who are tasked with supporting his resettlement in Canada. Together, they embark on a yearlong quest for personal freedom, revealing how in a world where one must constantly fight for the right to exist, survival itself becomes a victory. Someone Like...
Kainai is the largest reserve in Canada. Since 2014, the community has lost hundreds of its members to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. Every single member of the Kainai First Nation has been impacted by fentanyl- and addiction-related loss – which is the story in a lot of places all over the world. But Kainai’s approach to addiction is rooted in the Blackfoot word Kímmapiiyipitssini, which means “giving kindness to each other.” Celebrated filmmaker Elle-...
This is the third episode in our #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry. Voice artist and actor Vincent Tong ( Ninjago ; 16 Hudson ) returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to talk about his experiences navigating the voice, stage, and on-camera worlds as an Asian Canadian actor: how his ethnicity impacted his dreams; what the film and television industry can learn about diversity and inclusion initiatives from the the...
Praneet Akilla walked away from an engineering career in Alberta in order to make it as an actor. Since arriving in Vancouver in 2018, he’s lit up the screen in numerous projects, including FREYA , Rhona Rees’ award-winning sci-fi short about the dangers of AI technology; Netflix’s October Faction , where he played closeted jock Phillip Mishra; and CW’s Nancy Drew , where he plays Gil Bobbsey, one half of the iconic Bobbsey Twins (the half that went all the way with Nancy Drew in a recent episod...
Julia Sarah Stone’s filmography is populated by wildly vulnerable characters, like Lyric on AMC’s The Killing , Eva in Geoff Redknap’s stellar “disappearing man” film, The Unseen , and Junior in Ali Liebert’s The Quieting , as well as in indie gems like Honey Bee , Allure , Weirdos , and Everything Will Be Fine . Whatever the project, Julia communicates the pain, sadness, anger, and fleeting joy of her characters with empathy and astonishing ferocity. Julia’s latest film is Come True . She plays...
One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, but despite how rampant it is, you wouldn’t know it from how rarely it’s discussed between friends, or portrayed in film and television. Instead of sharing our miscarriage stories, we internalize our grief, trauma, and misplaced shame. Thus, our loss becomes a taboo subject, and the cycle of grief, trauma, and misplaced shame continues. Which makes Sarah Surh’s short film especially astonishing. Sarah is the producer, screenwriter, and star of Songbird...
This is the second episode in our new #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry. Actor and filmmaker Lee Shorten ( The Man in the High Castle , Parabola ) returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to discuss the challenges faced by Asian Canadian actors in the Vancouver film and television industry, how these challenges inform his own filmmaking, and Vancouver’s dynamic Asian Canadian indie film scene. Says Lee: “[Studios] ...
YVR Screen Scene presents the Screen Scene Society Podcast. Each episode, co-hosts Christian Sloan ( The Black Tape s, See ) and Sabrina Furminger ( The YVR Screen Scene Podcast ) watch a new-ish film or television project with special guests from the Vancouver film and television industry, and then podcast all about it. In Episode Six, Christian and Sabrina are joined by actress-filmmaker Lisa Ovies ( Puppet Killer ) and actor-filmmaker Matty Granger ( Parked; Chained ) to discuss The Mandalori...
This is the first episode in our new #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry. Actress Lexa Doig returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast for an incredibly raw and emotional conversation about cultural erasure in the entertainment industry, and to talk about her April 3 fundraiser for organizations fighting anti-Asian hate. Says Lexa (whose ancestry is Filipino and Scottish): “In our industry, the default for mainstream i...
Actor Viv Leacock returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to talk about his latest role: that of Joseph Canfield, the patriarch of the newest family to move to Hope Valley on Hallmark Channel’s wildly popular drama When Calls the Heart . Three of the four members of the Canfield family are Leacocks; Viv’s son Elias is playing 10-year-old Cooper Canfield and his daughter Vienna is playing Angela, a visually impaired teen with a profound gift for music. Natasha Burnett plays Minnie, the family mat...
One year ago this week, COVID-19 shut down the Vancouver film and television industry. On March 12, 2020, The CW suspended production on Riverdale when a crew member was reported to have been exposed to COVID; by March 15, cameras had stopped rolling on every single production in the province. By summer, the cameras were rolling again, but production looked and felt more than a little different. Gone were buffet lunches and a free-for-all at craft services. Daily temperature checks were expected...
Pride and greed. Lust and envy. Gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Those are all sins – the cardinal sins, the capital sins, the seven deadly sins – and they’re the foundation stones for The Sinners , a terrifying and exciting feature-length thriller from filmmaker Courtney Paige. The Sinners follows seven girls from a religious high school who decide to rebel by starting a cult in which they embody the seven deadly sins. Kaitlyn Bernard plays Grace Carver, the pastor’s daughter and most popular girl i...
Elizabeth “Liz” Bowen shines on SyFy’s Resident Alien . The hilarious and ominous sci-fi series tells the story of an alien – played by Alan Tudyk – who crashes to Earth and takes over the body and life of a doctor named Harry Vanderspeigle in a small Colorado town. The show is at once full of heart and darkly comic, and as Deputy Liv, Liz is brilliantly deadpan, astoundingly nuanced, and bloody funny. This is no surprise to anyone who is familiar with Liz’s work on stage or in Michelle’s , Hosp...
You don’t come across actor-showrunners too often – especially when the projects they’re acting in are not ones they’re showrunning. But Jonathan Lloyd Walker is doing just that. Jonathan’s acting credits include RED , where he played the special agent in charge of protecting the Vice-President from assassins – as well as The Thing , Smallville , The X-Files , The West Wing , Stargate, Degrassi: The Next Generation , The Outer Limits , The Killing , and most recently TNT’S Snowpiercer , where he...
On Monday, February 22, 2021, a film worker showed up for work to the Vancouver set of a production called Gone Mom wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. Two days later, they returned to work, where they were told by a producer not to wear anything Black Lives Matter again because that statement was too political. This worker resigned from the production the following day. Another BIPOC crew member removed his Black Lives Matter hoodie and gave it to a white colleague, who wore it and shared a p...
If you know anything about endometriosis, it’s probably because you are among the one in 10 women and AFAB people who live with its pain and stigma – or you love someone who does. In the simplest of terms, endometriosis happens when tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows outside of it, forming lesions and gluing organs together. But there’s nothing simple about the pain of endometriosis, and the medical misogyny that prevents diagnosis, investment in research, and effective tr...
Beverley Elliott played Granny on ABC’s beloved fantasy series, Once Upon A Time – and while she’s still closely associated with Granny years after the series took its final bow, Beverley is so much more than that one role. Over the course of her three decades in showbiz, Beverley has appeared in more than 100 film and television productions, from 21 Jump Street , Danger Bay , and The Beachcombers , to Harper’s Island , The X-Files , and Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood even name-checked her in his ac...
Content warning : This episode contains discussion about sexual violence and rape. Listener discretion is advised. If you are a victim of sexual assault or know someone who needs help, please check the episode notes for resources. You are not alone. April Telek is an accomplished actress whose filmography includes comedy, science fiction, fantasy, and drama. She shone as Constance Fogg on CBC’s women-driven Western series, Strange Empire , as Nell in Hell on Wheels , as Donna in Rogue , and in A...
