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WFF most successful to date

11th annual festival ends on a high note
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The best Fest yet

So, the Whistler Film Festival came and went. People met, discussions were had. Films were shown, people were entertained and enlightened. And, best of all, some celebrities were in town.

But now it's gone, gone, gone with only our memories to carry us forward — and, of course, the plethora of photographs and videos circulating the Internet. And the news from a variety of organizations (including Variety!) that the 11th annual festival was a huge success.

But why was it a huge success? Well:

WFF attracted bigwigs

It was not the most well attended WFF on record but it was certainly close.

But as executive director Shauna Hardy Mishaw says, "It's not about quantity, it's about the quality of people who came."

And, indeed, it was certainly the best attended so far, when you consider the array of studio bigwigs, actors, and filmmakers, both established and up-and-coming. Attendees are saying the festival line-up was the strongest ever. The partnership with Variety magazine and the announcement of the China Canada Script Competition helped raise the festival's international profile.

"It secures us an international reputation as an emerging force in the festival circuit," Hardy Mishaw says.

Attendee numbers were up five per cent from 2010, with a notable increase in unscheduled meetings taking place during the festival.

"What was really exciting to me too, actually was a lot of deals were done, so it's much as this was an audience festival, this is really a festival for the industry to meet and do business," she says.

And how is that facilitated? The layout and vibe of the village certainly helps, but above all the attendees seemed to be genuinely having fun.

"Ah! They were having the time of their lives, are you kidding? They went skiing, they went to the spa, they went to the village, they dined, they went to movies, they went to parties," Hardy Mishaw says. "They just loved it and again, the weather cooperated, which was super cool."

WFF cozied up to China

Do you know who else cooperated? China!

The Canadian film industry made enormous strides in securing a spot in China's celluloid landscape on Sunday with the announcement of the China Canada Script Competition.

The joint program — between the Whistler Film Festival Society, Telefilm Canada and the China Film Group — will see three co-productions over three years offering unprecedented access to the Chinese market, which has been notoriously difficult for international films to achieve distribution in.

"You can tone down my hyperbole if you wish," laughs Jane Milner, the WFF's director of development, "but China is one of the few places in the world that has lots of production to spend.

"So the whole film world would love to do business with China and would love to have China sitting at the table."

The partnership has been years in the making and credited largely to Whistler Film Festival Society board member Harry Sutherland, who has worked in the Chinese film industry in the past and had been working for several years to gain the trust of the CFG to push this deal through.

The specifics of the deal have yet to be nailed down, but essentially Chinese and Canadian filmmakers will work together at the very early creative stages to produce three join-production films per year for three years. Chinese productions studios will be brought over to listen to the Canadian pitches, and then pick the one they like and immediately start putting the film together.

This is for experienced feature filmmakers," Milner says. "Making a feature film is complex enough. Making a feature film co-production is way more difficult. The curve is exponential, so Canada needs to put its very best at the table."

Whistler, as a result, has now established itself as the place for producers to do business with China if the contacts are not already in place. She says the hope is to premier all these films at the WFF, although those details need to be worked out as well.

WFF was deemed "progressive"

But it wasn't a smash success for everyone involved. Brittany Baxter, co-director of the in-progress documentary The Sticking Place — which she touts as an interactive digital film — says that a lot of the information at the festival was "outdated" in terms of where the film industry is moving.

"I felt a little bit out of place," she says. "I definitely enjoyed it from a more traditional standpoint but as a new filmmaker I found that the information was a little outdated. The industry has a long way to come if they want to change and meet the standards of our new age."

With that said, she's quick to point out how progressive the WFF is with having a digital media component at all. Other festivals that she's attended in the past, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, have not included the digital media lab that she came to Whistler to attend.

"That shows that the film festival itself is really staying on the edge of things, and I think that if they continue to develop that then they'll definitely stay relevant and it will help them make a mark for new filmmakers and help our generation transition," she says.

Kryssta Mills, industry program producer for the festival, says that the festival is trying to open the lines of communication between the young- and old-school filmmakers, because there's still room for both in the Canadian film landscape.

She noticed an interesting dialogue happening between these two factions at the digital media lab. It was set up for filmmakers who had digital projects already on the go and are looking for guidelines on how to have these projects funded.

Over all, the participants were made up of emerging filmmakers who were looking toward a sense of where the industry was heading.

But when Mills opened the class to observers, she noticed that all of them were middle aged to older — established filmmakers who were used to the traditional format.

"They were all like, 'Okay, the kids have something on us,' you know?" Mills says.

But whether or not the digital media will remain a component of the festival in the coming years will be determined by how valuable those in attendance found the labs and the discussions.

But Baxter says the discussions are important and they were enlightening. The right questions are being asked and the festival itself had facilitated, to some extent, the harmonization of older and younger filmmakers, which will continue as digital media gains prominence in the industry.

"We found that people were really excited about our project and digital filmmaking in general," Baxter says. "Even though the industry itself might be resistant and scared, people are not."