“A Wake” movie: Sex, lies and death tapes
Starring Nicholas Campbell, Tara Nicodemo, Graham Abbey, Krista Sutton, Sarain Boylan and Martha Burns. Directed by Penelope Buitenhuis. 99 minutes. At AMC Yonge-Dundas. 14A
The guest of honour, flamboyant theatre director Gabor Zazlov (Nicholas Campbell), is in the living room. In a coffin. Yet he turns out to be the life of the party in Penelope Buitenhuis’ A Wake.
We first meet Gabor as he pleads with his wife Hanna (Tara Nicodemo) from his sickbed to do something she angrily insists she can’t bring herself to do.
Clearly she has acquiesced when we see her next. Friends, all members of the cast of Hamlet directed by the eccentric Gabor four years earlier, arrive at an isolated stone farmhouse in snowy rural Ontario. Shocked by Gabor’s sudden death, they embrace Hanna, murmur condolences and sit down at a communal table to drink, eat and talk about the great man.
Like The Big Chill without the Motown soundtrack, this bunch who had last been together for the Shakespearean drama that had soured by opening night, are reunited in Gabor’s name and with his presence is felt everywhere. Years of suppressed resentment, jealousy and unrequited love are uncorked with the free-flowing wine.
Hanna tells them she plans to video their remembrances of Gabor to play at a future memorial. Those too shy to talk to her lens can use a private camera set up in a small powder room as a kind of confessional.
Among the prodigal hams is handsome Tyler (Graham Abbey), who played Hamlet. Now a B-list Hollywood TV actor, he’s struggling to stay sober on this booze-soaked weekend while trying to hide his attraction to Earth-motherish Maya (Krista Sutton, also the story co-writer with Buitenhuis), his Ophelia. Tyler may be carrying a torch for Maya, but he has the hots for slutty Danielle (Sarain Boylan), who arrives looking like a refugee from an explosion in a Frederick’s of Hollywood outlet.
The troupe’s patrician patron Sabina (Martha Burns, the best of the cast) has a Danielle-shaped burr under her saddle for reasons that become clear right about the time the penny drops that the cast is reenacting Hamlet long before the Shakespeare comes out.
Gabor’s adult son Chad (Kristopher Turner) picks a lousy time to show up from a lengthy trip to Europe, finding the house full of drama, his stepmother wielding a video camera and his dad suddenly dead and in his box at a makeshift memorial.
It’s hard to not feel sorry for bird-like, wounded Hanna, who finds herself the target of everybody’s misplaced anger. A picture of Gabor emerges as a mad despot who delighted in emotionally jerking his actors around — something he still seems able to do in death as his final wish demands the cast read Hamlet aloud, as directed by his widow.
Much like Gabor, director Buitenhuis brings her actors together for A Wake and lets the chips fall where they may as they improvise their unscripted scenes. In some cases, it’s very successful, especially scenes with the brittle Sabina and wounded Hanna. But braying, sex-starved Danielle grows tiresome very quickly, and real estate magnate Raj (Raoul Bhaneja), who lost the role of Hamlet to Tyler, gets lost amid those busily acting around him. Without a script to keep the players in line, everybody tries to come out on top and the feeling occasionally strays into chaos and worse, periods of boredom.
Still Buitenhuis deserves praise for a brave and unconventional approach to making A Wake. Its experimental feel is tempered by solid camerawork — the stark winter landscape adds the right note of melancholy. And the story contains a satisfying twist that goes a long way to redeem some of the rough edges and to remind us that dead men do indeed tell tales. Whether or not we should believe them is the tricky part.
A Wake director Penelope Buitenhuis will be at the AMC Yonge and Dundas theatre on Feb 18 and 19 to introduce the first evening screenings and will do a Q&A afterwards
Vancouver film director Penelope Buitenhuis has advice to new filmmakers: Don’t wait for funding; start making movies now
A Wake
Directed by: Penelope Buitenhuis
When: Saturday, 7 p.m.
Where: Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St.
Women in Film Festival
When: Sat., 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sun., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St.
Tickets: Festival pass costs $35 for WIF members, $45 for non-members.
Admission to A Wake, the awards ceremony and opening reception is $25, or $30 for non-members.
Short-film screenings: $10, $12. Tickets available from womeninfilm.ca or at the door. Panel sessions are free.
VANCOUVER -- Vancouver-based film director Penelope Buitenhuis has advice for any young woman embarking on a career as a filmmaker: Don’t sit around talking about it. Make the films.
“With digital media you can make your own films cheaply,” says Buitenhuis, whose latest feature, A Wake, headlines the two-day Women in Film Festival on Saturday at Vancity Theatre.
“Just like any profession, you need to practise. I would say make [the film] before you expect any return. People tend to wait for funding, and I say just make them, and then you have something to show for yourself and the funding might follow. If you have good ideas and some kind of style, you just start.”
No one starts their directing career with features. All directors, Buitenhuis included, start with short films. In fact, she still makes them when she has the chance between features and television episodes.
“I live a pretty crazy life, and I always have crazy stories to tell,” says Buitenhuis, who moved back to Vancouver from Toronto two months ago. “Shorts are the quick and easy way to tell them. You don’t have to get funding to make them.”
Buitenhuis, a Toronto native, attended film school at both the University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University before moving to Germany and France for 10 years.
She spent the first decade of her career making short films, directed her first feature, Trouble (“a rock ’n’ roll drama”), in 1992, and has made theatrical features, TV movies, documentaries, episodic television and the occasional short ever since.
By anyone’s standards, she’s prolific, making 15 feature-length films in that period, as well as multiple episodes for 15 series, including Cold Squad and Paradise Falls.
“Producers love me because I can make movies extremely fast and therefore extremely cheap,” says Buitenhuis. “I won’t say I’m the Roger Corman of Canada, but it has a certain [cachet] when people know they’ll get what they want on time and on budget.”
Although Buitenhuis has production companies in Vancouver and Toronto, she rarely has to do the producer’s job of hustling distribution and financing, which saps time from making films.
“I’m good at meetings, but I’m not good at financing,” says the director, adding she’d like to produce her films.
Much has been made of Kathryn Bigelow’s victory last month at the Academy Awards, the first woman to win the best director prize, for The Hurt Locker. Buitenhuis says it’s a step in the right direction, but there are plenty more strides to be made.
She says women in Canada account for less than 10 per cent of directors.
“We’re still in a huge inequity right now,” she says.
The Women in Film Festival packs a lot into its two days. Saturday’s schedule begins at 10 a.m. with a two-hour program of shorts by first-time female directors, followed by a networking lunch, pitch sessions, a second program of short films, a 4 p.m. panel on the Year of Women in Movies, a screening of A Wake (Buitenhuis will take part in a question-and-answer session after the film) and wrapping up with the opening reception.
There will be three Legacy Awards presented Saturday night, including a $100,000 in-kind prize from the Creative Women Workshops Association.
Sunday begins with a panel session titled A Film and Television Industry Market Update: Facing the Hard Facts, followed by two programs of film shorts.
Starring Nicholas Campbell, Tara Nicodemo, Graham Abbey, Krista Sutton, Sarain Boylan and Martha Burns. Directed by Penelope Buitenhuis. 99 minutes. At AMC Yonge-Dundas. 14A
The guest of honour, flamboyant theatre director Gabor Zazlov (Nicholas Campbell), is in the living room. In a coffin. Yet he turns out to be the life of the party in Penelope Buitenhuis’ A Wake.
We first meet Gabor as he pleads with his wife Hanna (Tara Nicodemo) from his sickbed to do something she angrily insists she can’t bring herself to do.
Clearly she has acquiesced when we see her next. Friends, all members of the cast of Hamlet directed by the eccentric Gabor four years earlier, arrive at an isolated stone farmhouse in snowy rural Ontario. Shocked by Gabor’s sudden death, they embrace Hanna, murmur condolences and sit down at a communal table to drink, eat and talk about the great man.
Like The Big Chill without the Motown soundtrack, this bunch who had last been together for the Shakespearean drama that had soured by opening night, are reunited in Gabor’s name and with his presence is felt everywhere. Years of suppressed resentment, jealousy and unrequited love are uncorked with the free-flowing wine.
Hanna tells them she plans to video their remembrances of Gabor to play at a future memorial. Those too shy to talk to her lens can use a private camera set up in a small powder room as a kind of confessional.
Among the prodigal hams is handsome Tyler (Graham Abbey), who played Hamlet. Now a B-list Hollywood TV actor, he’s struggling to stay sober on this booze-soaked weekend while trying to hide his attraction to Earth-motherish Maya (Krista Sutton, also the story co-writer with Buitenhuis), his Ophelia. Tyler may be carrying a torch for Maya, but he has the hots for slutty Danielle (Sarain Boylan), who arrives looking like a refugee from an explosion in a Frederick’s of Hollywood outlet.
The troupe’s patrician patron Sabina (Martha Burns, the best of the cast) has a Danielle-shaped burr under her saddle for reasons that become clear right about the time the penny drops that the cast is reenacting Hamlet long before the Shakespeare comes out.
Gabor’s adult son Chad (Kristopher Turner) picks a lousy time to show up from a lengthy trip to Europe, finding the house full of drama, his stepmother wielding a video camera and his dad suddenly dead and in his box at a makeshift memorial.
It’s hard to not feel sorry for bird-like, wounded Hanna, who finds herself the target of everybody’s misplaced anger. A picture of Gabor emerges as a mad despot who delighted in emotionally jerking his actors around — something he still seems able to do in death as his final wish demands the cast read Hamlet aloud, as directed by his widow.
Much like Gabor, director Buitenhuis brings her actors together for A Wake and lets the chips fall where they may as they improvise their unscripted scenes. In some cases, it’s very successful, especially scenes with the brittle Sabina and wounded Hanna. But braying, sex-starved Danielle grows tiresome very quickly, and real estate magnate Raj (Raoul Bhaneja), who lost the role of Hamlet to Tyler, gets lost amid those busily acting around him. Without a script to keep the players in line, everybody tries to come out on top and the feeling occasionally strays into chaos and worse, periods of boredom.
Still Buitenhuis deserves praise for a brave and unconventional approach to making A Wake. Its experimental feel is tempered by solid camerawork — the stark winter landscape adds the right note of melancholy. And the story contains a satisfying twist that goes a long way to redeem some of the rough edges and to remind us that dead men do indeed tell tales. Whether or not we should believe them is the tricky part.
A Wake director Penelope Buitenhuis will be at the AMC Yonge and Dundas theatre on Feb 18 and 19 to introduce the first evening screenings and will do a Q&A afterwards
Vancouver film director Penelope Buitenhuis has advice to new filmmakers: Don’t wait for funding; start making movies now
A Wake
Directed by: Penelope Buitenhuis
When: Saturday, 7 p.m.
Where: Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St.
Women in Film Festival
When: Sat., 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sun., 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour St.
Tickets: Festival pass costs $35 for WIF members, $45 for non-members.
Admission to A Wake, the awards ceremony and opening reception is $25, or $30 for non-members.
Short-film screenings: $10, $12. Tickets available from womeninfilm.ca or at the door. Panel sessions are free.
VANCOUVER -- Vancouver-based film director Penelope Buitenhuis has advice for any young woman embarking on a career as a filmmaker: Don’t sit around talking about it. Make the films.
“With digital media you can make your own films cheaply,” says Buitenhuis, whose latest feature, A Wake, headlines the two-day Women in Film Festival on Saturday at Vancity Theatre.
“Just like any profession, you need to practise. I would say make [the film] before you expect any return. People tend to wait for funding, and I say just make them, and then you have something to show for yourself and the funding might follow. If you have good ideas and some kind of style, you just start.”
No one starts their directing career with features. All directors, Buitenhuis included, start with short films. In fact, she still makes them when she has the chance between features and television episodes.
“I live a pretty crazy life, and I always have crazy stories to tell,” says Buitenhuis, who moved back to Vancouver from Toronto two months ago. “Shorts are the quick and easy way to tell them. You don’t have to get funding to make them.”
Buitenhuis, a Toronto native, attended film school at both the University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University before moving to Germany and France for 10 years.
She spent the first decade of her career making short films, directed her first feature, Trouble (“a rock ’n’ roll drama”), in 1992, and has made theatrical features, TV movies, documentaries, episodic television and the occasional short ever since.
By anyone’s standards, she’s prolific, making 15 feature-length films in that period, as well as multiple episodes for 15 series, including Cold Squad and Paradise Falls.
“Producers love me because I can make movies extremely fast and therefore extremely cheap,” says Buitenhuis. “I won’t say I’m the Roger Corman of Canada, but it has a certain [cachet] when people know they’ll get what they want on time and on budget.”
Although Buitenhuis has production companies in Vancouver and Toronto, she rarely has to do the producer’s job of hustling distribution and financing, which saps time from making films.
“I’m good at meetings, but I’m not good at financing,” says the director, adding she’d like to produce her films.
Much has been made of Kathryn Bigelow’s victory last month at the Academy Awards, the first woman to win the best director prize, for The Hurt Locker. Buitenhuis says it’s a step in the right direction, but there are plenty more strides to be made.
She says women in Canada account for less than 10 per cent of directors.
“We’re still in a huge inequity right now,” she says.
The Women in Film Festival packs a lot into its two days. Saturday’s schedule begins at 10 a.m. with a two-hour program of shorts by first-time female directors, followed by a networking lunch, pitch sessions, a second program of short films, a 4 p.m. panel on the Year of Women in Movies, a screening of A Wake (Buitenhuis will take part in a question-and-answer session after the film) and wrapping up with the opening reception.
There will be three Legacy Awards presented Saturday night, including a $100,000 in-kind prize from the Creative Women Workshops Association.
Sunday begins with a panel session titled A Film and Television Industry Market Update: Facing the Hard Facts, followed by two programs of film shorts.
