Dreamfilm News

Courage takes many forms, but on Thursday May 12th, it was 6 amazingly courageous British Columbians who were celebrated at the Courage to Come Back Awards, a gala evening at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver hosted by the Coast Mental Health Foundation.

Trevor Greene, the subject of our documentary Peace Warrior, was the recipient of the Physical Rehabilitation award, for his inspiring dedication to his recovery from the horrifying axe attack he endured while serving as a soldier in Afghanistan.

When Trevor spoke after receiving his award, you could have heard a pin drop even though there were 800 people in the banquet hall. Trevor’s wife Debbie and daughter Grace were there, along with his parents Dick and Bess Greene.

The “Evening of Inspiration” was exactly that, and raised almost $650,000 for the Coast Mental Health Foundation. Our congratulations to all of the award recipients, for showing us it is possible to triumph over the most daunting kinds of adversity.

We are so honoured that The Downside of High has won a Gold World Medal in the Health/Medical documentary category at the 2011 New York Festivals International Television & Film Awards.

“It took a lot of courage for the young people we profiled in the documentary to go public with their history of mental illness,  and particularly to connect it to marijuana use. So it’s very gratifying to see the documentary they made possible get this kind of prestigious recognition,” says producer Sue Ridout.

The New York Festivals Awards have been around for 54 years, but this is a special year: it’s the first time a lifetime achievement award will be handed out (to the legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles).  It feels particularly meaningful to get a Gold World Medal at the 2011 Festivals.

The Downside of High was directed and written by Bruce Mohun, story-produced by Maureen Palmer, produced by Sue Ridout. Director of photography John Collins, editor Tim Wanlin, music composer Tim McCauley.

Travel is a normal aspect of our jobs as filmmakers, but interestingly, this time it’s not just us.

Many of the scientists we’re talking to as we film our upcoming documentary Programmed to be Fat? are busy travelling to meet the other scientists we’re talking to. There are a lot of meetings this year, as people try to figure out which tests will be most effective to arrive at some kind of conclusion about obesogens.

If that’s a word you’re not familiar with yet, you will be. Obesogens are environmental chemicals, man-made and naturally occuring, believed by some leading scientists to be contributing to the obesity epidemic – especially for people under the age of 50. (So being fat might not be our fault. Controversial? Oh yes!)

We met one of the experts in this field, Alison Holloway, at the Society of Toxicology meeting in Montreal. But to see her work, we had to travel back to Toronto with her, on the train.

(No free ride for the crew. Alison put them to work marking ‘lay tests’, in which students have to write grant requests in language that any lay person can understand. That’s cameraman Max Lindenthaler on the right, and soundman Patrick Brereton.)

More on what happened when we reached our stop later.

As the popularity of common-law unions has continued to climb, organizations that advocate marriage are campaigning to save matrimony – with some very visual, and sometimes controversial, approaches.

The Church of England’s angle of aggressively trying to sell marriage in the Church caught our eye early.   We just show them “hawking their wares” at a wedding fair in Thoroughly Modern Marriage. But the move that caused a lot of controversy was their offer of free baptisms if you “bought” a marriage in the Church. This was because they discovered 1 in every 5 couples who got married in the Church of England already had children. So they thought, “well we may as well offer to baptize them”. Problem is, the Church does not condone sex before marriage. There was an uproar and the idea was dropped.

And in addition to groups pushing for people to GET married, there’s also a well designed movement to KEEP people married.

Huge billboards in the US make arguments that appeal to our self-interest:  ”Married people live longer…Married people make more money”

And the Smart Marriage movement has a massive following with conferences, retreats and marriage classes.

The battle for the hearts and minds of couples, like marriage itself, is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

As we dove into the research for the documentary Thoroughly Modern Marriage we were surprised by more than a few facts and figures.

For instance, roughly 80% of Canadian women get married at some point in their lives. We’ve kind of forgotten about this as we’ve become fixated on divorce statistics. (The divorce rate is 38%, by the way, although most people bandy about the idea that it’s 50%. It’s still high but a long way from 50%.)

In fact, we met a group of young female university students who were all desperate to get married, very worried they hadn’t met their future husbands yet (at 19/20, thinking if it didn’t happen soon, they might be 40 God forbid with a 10 year-old.)  It would be easy to assume that young, hip, modern women these days might not really want marriage after seeing the broken relationships of their parents, cohorts, etc. But overwhelmingly they want it – and bad, super bad. They also said they wanted a more traditional life, less work, more time at home with hubby and kids. Hmm!

But as you’ll see in the documentary, truly one of the most intriguing aspects of modern marriage is the variety. A legal union of two people is as different as the two people within it.

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