Representatives of B.C.’s film and television production industry say more effective international co-production agreements are essential for the health of their industry. This was a key point emerging from a meeting with the Minister of Canadian Heritage in Vancouver on Tuesday, as part of the federal government’s pre-budget consultations.

“A lot of countries want to co-produce with Canada, but I think it’s really important that it not be bogged down by bureaucracy,” said Brightlight Pictures co-chairman Stephen Hegyes, who said some co-production treaties simply aren’t working.

“Films and television shows come together very quickly. They come together when the talent is there, when the scripts are ready, all that kind of stuff. We need to have fast action from the co-production office to be able to say ‘yes, that’ll work’ and not ‘we’ll get back to you in six weeks.’”

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The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival is holding its annual fundraiser, A Night of Film, Music, and Wine, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday (November 17) at Granville 7 Cinemas (855 Granville Street). A screening of Mercedes Sosa Cantora, un Viaje Intimo ( Cantora, An Intimate Journey ), a documentary about the acclaimed recording artist, will be embellished with wine, hors d’oeuvres, door prizes, and live music by Latin guitarists Joaquin Ernesto and Pancho y Sal. Tickets are $20, available at www.vlaff.org.

There was a time when the five-day movie bash in the mountains had to make do with leftovers that didn’t make the cut at the earlier fall festivals.

This year, the festival opens Dec. 1 with Daydream Nation, a black-comic small-town story filmed in Fort Langley starring Kat Dennings, Andie MacDowell and Josh Lucas, and written and directed by Toronto’s Michael Goldbach, who is heading to Whistler.

In the 2009-2010 Annual Activity Report, British Columbia Film reported that the total amount of production spent in this province rose slightly from $1.2 billion in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.

Several big-budget projects (or foreign productions) shot in B.C. contributed to service production spending levels shooting up from $841 million in 2008 to about $1.1 billion in 2009. Service production spending has continued its upward climb since hitting a decade-low in 2007 ($535 million).

Vancouver-based Cannon, when not writing for The Tyee and many others, pours his comedic imagination into screenplays as well as the make-believe ranting radio persona of Rusty Shackleford. Cannon has burnished a script for a comedy web series called DOCUMENT, a cerebral satire of reality television, shot mockumentary-style. Instead of haunting the halls of Hollywood studios in the hopes of taking the life-changing lunch, he’s posted the DOCUMENT-pitching video above on Kickstarter’s website.

The film, which also won the same accolade at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, concerns twins who journey to the Middle East to satisfy their mother’s dying wish only to uncover shocking family secrets.

Steve Nash, in his first film outing, spotlights Terry Fox in his documentary, Michael Ostroff focuses on artist Emily Carr and Douglas Arrowsmith examines singer Ron Sexsmith.

“It’s really a year where a lot of Canadians have looked to their own icons,” Alan Franey, VIFF artistic director, said in an interview with CBC News.

He said Fox’s family will be at the Vancouver premiere of Into the Wind, Nash’s re-examination of the 1980 Marathon of Hope with the inside story drawn from Fox’s journal entries.

This year’s Vancouver International Film Festival promises innovation not just in the features, documentaries and shorts it will screen, but in its trailers.

Rather than run the same three or four trailers before each screening, creative agency TBWA is producing 16 separate trailers – one for each day of the festival – that together tell one story, creating, in essence, a short film.

Submissions by Nicole Duquette of Richmond and Sterling Pache of Vancouver are among the 125 shortlisted videos for the YouTube Play exhibit on Oct. 21.

Duquette’s video is a three-minute animated short titled Dreamscape, about a young girl in hospital who has a dreamlike experience populated by a winged cat and a flaming passageway. Duquette, 20, made the video while taking the classical animation program at the Vancouver Film School.

“It’s been a really amazing experience,” she said by phone. “I hope it furthers my career in the arts field.”

Your chance to meet a geek comes Tuesday at Vancouver’s first Meet the Geek event where a gourmet dinner will be served up with hearty helpings of geekery as some of the city’s top tech minds gather at the Salt Cellar to “meet, eat and give back.”

The idea behind the event, hosted by the Social Media Club Vancouver (SMCV) and sponsored by Vancouver Food Tour, is to give the less technologically inclined a chance to get together and pose their most pressing tech questions to the experts and at the same time raise money for a worthy cause.

The cause in this case is the independent documentary, With Glowing Hearts Hearts, a two-hour film that will focus on four Vancouver activists and artists living and working in the Downtown Eastside.

Here’s a rundown (in chronological order) of some of the upcoming film festivals and series to keep you busy until Christmas.

VIFF opens Sept. 30 with Barney’s Version, the film based on the Mordecai Richler novel of the same name about a lovable curmudgeon played by Paul Giamatti.

Score: A Hockey Musical also gets the gala treatment along with Fathers & Sons, a comedy about four grown men and their dads from Carl Bessai.

Vancouver director Bessai is also showing his film Repeaters, a gritty thriller about three people caught in a trap that forces them to repeat the same day over and over again.

Landmark Cinemas, which leases the Paramount Theatre where film fest movies are screened has pulled the festival’s show time—traditionally the third Wednesday of the month, at 7 p.m. Instead, they’ve offered the Alberni Valley Museum, which oversees the film fest, Sundays at 5 p.m.

After polling season ticket purchasers, the film fest committee felt that time period would no longer make the festival viable, museum education curator Shelley Harding said.

Landmark’s decision stems on their method of releasing films in smaller communities, including Port Alberni. They have to guarantee to their distributors “every available screen”—even though the film fest represents a single showing per month for seven months.

Then along came July 1, the day the new HST came into effect. “It was like a starting pistol sounded” according to Don Madsen, who owns the city’s largest period prop house, Mount Pleasant Furniture. “From dead slow, we suddenly had productions lining up to rent our furniture”.

What happened? In a word (well, an acronym): the HST. The new ‘Harmonized Sales Tax’ came into effect on that day. A coincidence? Nope.

Flash forward several years and he was making home videos on the family video camera. Then the Wellington Secondary School graduate took a video production class in Grade 9 and his interest in film soared to new heights.

Brugge has made more than a dozen films so far – the longest of which is 56 minutes – and he’s already winning money and accolades for his work.

Meatspace, a five-minute film about a guy who feels more comfortable in cyberspace as opposed to “meatspace” (the real world), won best drama at the Powell River Film Festival in February and top senior film and best drama at the B.C. Student Film Festival in May.