Glen Grunau was chatting with his neighbour Sinjin Dixon-Warren about the end of Theatre One’s Fringe Flicks last year when they decided, after a few conversations, to try and “resurrect alternative cinema here on the mid-island.”
That led to the birth of the The Nanaimo International Film Screening Society, which is launching its first season with three feature-length films at the Vancouver Island Conference Centre’s Shaw auditorium this weekend.
If Grunau and Sinjin are the proud parents of the new society, as its president and secretary respectively, then Theatre One was the midwife lending critical support to the project as it got off the ground.
Theatre One’s artistic and managing director Michael Cade was supportive of the new society and helped by sending information about it to Theatre One’s volunteers and email list.
“We don’t know if we would have been successful getting a start this early on if that decision hadn’t been made,” Grunau said. “We received quite a favorable response from former Fringe Flicks loyalists and were able to get a good number showing up to our first organizational meeting at the downtown library back in March.”
Cade told The Discourse that Theatre One made the decision to end its Fringe Flicks program after the series, which was a fundraiser to support the organization’s live theatre performances, lost $30,000 in the 2022-23 season after ticket sales fell to about a quarter of previous years.
“Another year of that loss would have ended our company,” Cade said. “So, the decision was made to suspend that with the hopes that a phoenix would come out from the ashes and look at producing an independent film series as a mandate, rather than as fundraising.”
Cade said that the formation of the Nanaimo International Film Screening Society is a positive development for both independent film and live theatre in the city.
“Instead of one organization struggling to do two disparate things, [we are] shifting it to two organizations doing two disparate things [and} both doing it well,” he said.
The Nanaimo International Film Screening Society mission is “to gather back to the large screen a growing community of film lovers who enjoy and celebrate the transformative benefits of independent International and Canadian cinema.”
The three films in the society’s fall season include Riceboy Sleeps, a Canadian film looking at the trauma of immigrating to Canada, which will kick off the festival’s screenings on Sunday, Oct. 6 with two screenings at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. along with a Gala reception at 5:30 p.m.
The season continues with American comedy Thelma in November and the Japanese film Evil Does Not Exist in December.
The society is also getting logistical support from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)’s Film Circuit, which helps bring Canadian and International films to cities and towns across the country.
“They approach all the film distributors on our behalf and arrange for film rights,” Grunau said. “They have some administrative contributions that they make to help us along the way and it’s a really broad network of communities who all work closely with TIFF.”
As for the trend towards people watching movies via streaming services at home instead of in a theatre, Grunau said that part of the appeal for him is the lack of distractions when watching a movie.
“I consider myself someone who has a fairly long attention span for watching cinema, even slow moving cinema, and yet the temptation to pull out the cell phone and chat messages and emails in the middle of a film is still sometimes too strong to resist,” he said.
“Watching films in a community offers an experience that one can never find at home. There’s something about knowing that the person sitting beside you is as engaged in the film as you are,” he adds.
“If there’s a reaction in the audience, knowing that that’s not just your reaction, it’s a reaction that other audience members are sharing with you, it builds a bit of a connection and grows a sense of community.”
