Gary Burns | |
---|---|
Born | 1960 (age 63–64) |
Occupation(s) | Film director Screenwriter |
Years active | 1995 - Present |
Gary Burns (born 1960) is a Canadian film writer and director. Burns studied drama at the University of Calgary before attending Concordia University, where he graduated in 1992 from the Fine Arts film program.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, many of Burns' films are shot in Calgary, and contain references to the particularities of living in the city. The Plus 15 system becomes the habitrail of urban semi-professionals in waydowntown and the public transportation system becomes a node where lives intersect in The Suburbanators. Radiant City examines the seemingly endless amount of suburban neighbourhoods that has overtaken Calgary.
Burns is an alumnus of the University of Calgary's television program.
His works have been very well received at Canadian film festivals. His first feature film, The Suburbanators , debuted at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival, where it placed in the top ten Canadian films and was also invited to the Sundance film festival in 1996. It is a comedy/road movie about bored suburban slackers in Calgary.
At the 1997 Vancouver International Film Festival, he was awarded Best Emerging Director for Kitchen Party , a "teenage house party gone wrong" comedy. His film waydowntown was given the Best Canadian Feature prize at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. [1] His 2006 film, Radiant City , co-directed with Jim Brown, garnered the Special Jury Prize at the Vancouver International Film Festival. [2]
Mark Achbar is a Canadian filmmaker, best known for The Corporation (2003), Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1994), and as an Executive Producer on over a dozen feature documentaries.
The Irish Rovers is a group of Irish musicians that formed in Toronto, Canada in 1963 and named after the traditional song "The Irish Rover". They are best known for their international television series, contributing to the popularization of Irish Music in North America, and for the songs "The Unicorn", "Drunken Sailor", "Wasn't That a Party", "The Orange and the Green", "Whiskey on a Sunday", "Lily the Pink", "Finnegan's Wake" and "The Black Velvet Band".
Mina Shum is an independent Canadian filmmaker. She is a writer and director of award-winning feature films, numerous shorts and has created site specific installations and theatre. Her features, Double Happiness and Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity both premiered in the US at the Sundance Film Festival and Double Happiness won the Wolfgang Staudte Prize for Best First Feature at the Berlin Film Festival and the Audience Award at Torino. She was director resident at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. She was also a member of an alternative rock band called Playdoh Republic.
Waydowntown is a 2000 film directed by Gary Burns and starring Fab Filippo, Don McKellar, Marya Delver and Michelle Beaudoin. The film is a dark comedy that explores office culture and its effects and often uses surrealism to achieve its thematic goals.
John Zaritsky was a Canadian documentarian/filmmaker. His work has been broadcast in 35 countries and screened at more than 40 film festivals around the world; in 1983, his film Just Another Missing Kid won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Kitchen Party is a 1997 film written and directed by Gary Burns. The movie cast a number of then-unknown young Canadian actors, including Scott Speedman, Laura Harris, and Tygh Runyan, and was released on September 8, 1997 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is the largest documentary festival in North America. The event takes place annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The 27th edition of the festival took place online throughout May and June 2020. In addition to the annual festival, Hot Docs owns and operates the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, administers multiple production funds, and runs year-round screening programs including Doc Soup and Hot Docs Showcase.
Thomas "Thom" Fitzgerald is an American-Canadian film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright and producer.
Jim Brown is a Canadian radio personality, best known as a host of programming on CBC Radio One.
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Radiant City is a 2006 Canadian film written and directed by Gary Burns and Jim Brown. It is about the suburban sprawl and the Moss family's life in the suburbs. The film is openly critical towards suburban sprawl and its negative effects, being ironic and amusing at the same time.
City of Gold is a 1957 Canadian documentary film by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig, chronicling Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush. It made innovative use of archival photos and camera movements to animate still images, while also combining narration and music to bring drama to the whole. Its innovative use of still photography in this manner has been cited by Ken Burns as the source of inspiration for his so-called Ken Burns effect, a type of panning and zooming effect used in video production to animate still images.
Charles Officer was a Canadian film and television director, writer, actor, and professional hockey player.
NUTV at the University of Calgary is one of the oldest university-based television production societies in Canada. Established in 1983 and incorporated in 1991, NUTV is a campus-based non-profit organization that offers opportunities to University of Calgary students and community members to explore the medium of television by learning the various stages of production. These opportunities include reporting/interviewing, hosting, writing, camera operation, lighting, sound mixing, using Final Cut Pro & Adobe Creative Suite, editing, producing, and directing. NUTV is part of the University of Calgary Tri-Media Alliance, composed of print, radio, and television (NUTV). The University of Calgary is unique in that it is one of only two Canadian universities that house three media operations on-campus, the other being the University of Toronto Mississauga's UTM/TV.
The imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival is the world's largest Indigenous film and media arts festival, held annually in Toronto. The festival focuses on the film, video, radio, and new media work of Indigenous, Aboriginal and First Peoples from around the world. The festival includes screenings, parties, panel discussions, and cultural events.
Jonathan Luke Weiser Monro is a multi award-winning Canadian-American actor, pianist, musical director, singer, composer, and lyricist. His first major appearance was as a pianist at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City in 1991.
The Toronto International Film Festival Award for Best Canadian Film is an annual juried film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to a film judged to be the best Canadian feature film.
The Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to the film rated as the year's most popular film with festival audiences. Past sponsors of the award have included Cadillac and Grolsch.
The Suburbanators is a Canadian road movie/comedy film written and directed by Gary Burns and produced in 1995 by Burns and John Hazlett. It tells the story of bored, estranged slackers in their 20s who spend their time in suburban strip-malls, subdivisions and car lots in Calgary. The film was made for CDN$65,000. It was invited to play at the Sundance Film Festival and sold to the Sundance Channel. It is the first of what writer George Melnyk calls a trilogy which concludes with Kitchen Party (1998) and waydowntown (2000).
Chandler Levack is a Canadian writer and filmmaker. She is a two-time Juno Award nominee for Video of the Year, receiving nominations alongside Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux at the Juno Awards of 2015 for directing PUP's "Guilt Trip" music video, and at the Juno Awards of 2016 for directing PUP's "Dark Days" music video. She was also a Prism Prize nominee for both "Guilt Trip" and "Dark Days", and has also directed music videos for DZ Deathrays and Jeremy Dutcher.