The Fundy Film Society

Fundy Filmmakers Night 1

Fundy Tide (2007) 5 min

Last summer, Fred Macdonald tackled the challenge of juggling tide times and weather to capture stunning high definition time-lapse animations of the tidal seascapes around the eastern end of the Bay of Fundy.

Fred Macdonald
studied film at Humber College (Toronto) in the early 1970s. His first professional assignments were shooting and editing for CTV National News and then for CBC’s The National. His companies, Great Circle Pictures and 45 North Broadcast Group, have provided services to network television and production companies worldwide. Fred has spent his career as a cinematographer shooting in both film and video, as seen in The Prince and the Grail on Monday’s screening schedule. Fred lives near Canning.

The Geometry of Love (2006) 48 min
As in her best seller, author Margaret Vissar embarks on an astonishingly expansive journey through the small church of Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura in Rome and with meticulous scholarship lifts the lid on what seems ordinary to reveal extraordinary connections to the foundation of Western Civilization and a twelve year old girl.
Recipient: National Gabriel Award (Los Angeles) for Cultural & Arts documentary,
Award: Best Religion/Ethics, Director, Music – Houston World Fest 2006
Invited: Peabody Collection of the Museum of Broadcast Communication (Chicago)
Nominated: Best Documentary (Culture & Arts): Yorkton Film Festival 2006;
Best Cinematographer, Music, Sound: AMPIA Awards Alberta. 2006

Bev Bliss
hails from Canada — all of it. She spent her childhood in Manitoba, her youth in Montréal and part of her adult life in Alberta before moving to Nova Scotia in 2006. Her busy work slate is testament that a diverse life is terrific preparation for the multi-tasking role of a film producer. After living many years in the Rockies, she is delighted to live in a place where Rhododendrons can grow.

Upright Grand (2003) 26 min
A poignant personal essay about music and memory, a mother’s journey into dementia, and the harrowing choices we sometimes have to make when our parents become too old to care for themselves.
Award: Best Documentary Short – Golden Sheaf, Yorkton Film & Video Festival 2003
Finalist: The “Freddie” International Health and Media Awards, Los Angeles 2003;
The Columbus International Film and Video Awards 2003
Honorable Mention: The New York Film and Television Awards 2003

Tim Wilson
is an award-winning radio and television documentary producer and writer whose work has been featured on CBC Radio’s network programs — IDEAS, Sunday Morning, Morningside, Tapestry — and on television’s CBC News Sunday. The Last Weir, a portrait of a traditional fishing community on Nova Scotia’s Digby Neck, won Best Atlantic Short Film, Atlantic Film Festival 2005, and a “Chris” at The Columbus International Film and Video Festival.

Among the many prominent writers, artists and teachers he has interviewed or profiled are: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, Robert (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) Pirsig, and Jacques Derrida. His short essays were a regular feature on the Hallmark Channel’s New Morning program in the U.S., and his photography has been published in National Geographic online.

Inside Time (2007) 35 min
Bank robber, Stephen Reid, who is in effect “doing time,” is the narrator of this meditation on time. Few bank robbers have been able to tell their own story with as much self-awareness as Reid, an extraordinary man, writer, and a member of the infamous “Stopwatch Gang.” Reid has an 18-year sentence to reflect on his journey. Instead of racing against or fighting time, whether through heroin addiction or robbing banks, he is now compelled to contemplate the present. Music and image shape an artful visual essay on time through the experience of this legendary bank robber.

Jason Young
earned an honours degree in journalism and film from Carleton University (Ottawa) and began his career working as a crew member on the sets of various feature films and television series in Toronto. In 2003 he wrote and directed his first feature documentary for the NFB, Animals, which won several festival awards, garnered two Gemini nominations and had its Valley premiere at the Al Whittle Theatre in the autumn of 2005. He lives with his wife, Julia, and their many dogs and horses on a farm in Sheffield Mills.

A Ballad of South Mountain (1987) 55 min
Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley is known as a prosperous agricultural area, but it also contains pockets of rural poverty. The most visible aspect of this poverty is substandard housing. In a fascinating look at an isolated and marginalized social group, this film focuses on two couples for whom an improvement in housing has fostered hopes for a better life. A Ballad of South Mountain deals with some of the problems of, and solutions to, rural poverty in the Annapolis Valley.

Hubert Schuurman
was born in the Netherlands and arrived in Canada in 1953, where he spent seven years in the film industry. He began his filmmaking career with Crawley Films in Ottawa in 1953. In 1954, he joined CBC in Winnipeg as an editor and later the National Film Board in Montréal. He went back to school at Memorial University (Saint Johns), and completed an MA in sociology and economics at the University of Minnesota (St. Paul). He spent the next 10 years with the Inuit in the Arctic and Greenland. In 1976, he returned to the art of filmmaking. His work ranges from the portrait of a nomadic family in Norwegian Lapland to the story of a handicapped boy in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia. He holds film credits for directing, writing, photography and editing in over a dozen films. His work for the National Film Board of Canada has earned him a number of awards in Canada and the US. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and is the recipient of a Governor General’s medal. His book, The People of the Swan, was published in 2007.