By Leah Scheitel
@leah_schei
It’s no secret that women in Vancouver’s film industry are working hard. With local film organizations such as The National Film Board of Canada and TELUS STORYHIVE making the pledge to fund content with gender parity in mind, the city is lucky to be seeing a lot more women-helmed stories on screen as of late.
We caught up with five emerging female filmmakers in the city, the names of whom you’ll be seeing a lot more of this festival season.
Mayumi Yoshida – Actor, Writer, Director
Mayumi Yoshida started her career in front of the camera in Japan, acting in theatre projects in her native country. It wasn’t until she relocated to Vancouver 2010 to attend Vancouver Film School that she altered her attention to more behind the camera aspects, but that wasn’t an intentional move.
“The opportunity came to write a play for the Fringe Festival. I wrote a play about my grandma and around that time STORYHIVE came up with the female directors edition for short film,” she said, saying she was tagged in so many posts on social media for it, she decided to try to morph her play into a short film titled Akashi. “It was going to be majority Japanese, and I couldn’t find anyone who could speak Japanese or write Japanese and direct Japanese short, so it kind of came from necessity that I do all three and so I did all three.”
Her ideas came to fruition and then some, as Akashi has won multiple awards at a variety of film festivals, including the grand price for the short film edition at STORYHIVE, and earning her representation from a major talent agency in the United States. Since, she has gotten work on The Man in High Castle on Amazon Prime.
Now, Yoshida is working on a plethora of endeavors, including turning Akashi into a feature length film, which she hopes to be shot in 2020 and released shortly after that. And although her life and work have taken her all over the world, from her family’s home base in Japan to stints in Washington, DC and Belgium, she has a soft spot for Vancouver.
“Vancouver does feel like my own home. I’ve built my career here. I chose to go here by myself. I’m responsible for being here. I feel like this is my own home.”
Tara Pratt – Actor
Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, Tara Pratt had an infatuation with science fiction movies. She knew she wanted to work in the industry that fascinated her, so she earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta with the understanding that she would have to relocated to either Toronto or Vancouver – Canadian film industry hubs – in order to pursue acting as a career path. It wasn’t until an impromptu road trip to Vancouver in 2006 that she decided to relocate and make her way as an actress on the West Coast.
To get her foot in the door, she did pro-bono work with film students to help her flesh out a demo reel and land an agent. After that, “it was just staying in it all long enough to keep getting roles and start building a resume and actually booking the gigs,” she said.
Now, she makes her living from acting in commercials and films, although she admits that split is not 50-50. “I tend to shoot more commercials then film and TV gigs so the last thing I shot was a Coffee Mate commercial that will probably be coming out in the holiday season,” she said. She was also just cast in a Netflix movie (the details are embargoed) which is set to shoot this September.
In 2019 Pratt worked on a project that was a little closer to heart – an homage to the Alien franchise. A Vancouver-based directing duo, the Spear sisters, cast her in her short film, Alien Ore, which was produced by IGN in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the original Alien premier. Alien Ore, along with the other Alien-inspired short films, are available for viewing on YouTube.
Now that Vancouver has been home to Pratt for the past decade, she loves the scene and the work she is able to do from there, making it harder to imagine moving to Toronto.
“But my understanding is between the two cities it seems to go up and down in terms of the number of productions,” she said. “I don’t feel the need to move out there. They are just different productions shot in different locations with different vibes.”
Kat Jayme – Director/Filmmaker
Kat Jayme has an admitted passion for basketball, namely the Vancouver Grizzlies, the NBA team that shortly lived in Vancouver from 1995 to 2001. This passion morphed itself into her directorial debut, Finding Big Country, about Grizzlies star Bryant “Big Country” Reeves. For Jayme, the award-winning documentary was a decade-long endeavor.
“I started dreaming about this film when I was in university. I was in film school at UBC and it was one of the dream stories that I wanted to tell and one of the dream projects that I wanted to make,” she said, “so, I say it’s [been] about 10 years.”
The detailed work of pitching it out to funders started around 2016, to which Jayme says she received more than one rejection. But a grant from STORYHIVE in 2017 finally enabled her to make her dream film. It was filmed in 2017 and, she says, it was a “dream come true. To have found Bryant, to have met him and to be invited onto his ranch. I go ranching with him, we play basketball together. He is such a nice and awesome human being.”
Finding Big Country debuted at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2018 to an adoring audience. “I had a good feeling about there was an audience for this but I was completely blown away by the reception and the atmosphere at screenings,” Jayme said. “They were a huge part of Vancouver’s history and it was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who still remembered and still cared about the team.”
Jayme came to filmmaking in a very natural way – from being a subject for her grandfather, who was a filmmaker in the Philippines. “I grew up with a camera pointed at my face. Always my whole life, all our lives have been documented by my grandfather. So I kind of, without being super conscious, started documenting everything,” she says, adding that she was “that friend” in high school who constantly had a camera and was directing her friends into poses.
Jayme is currently working on a feature-length documentary about the Vancouver Grizzlies, which is in the pre-production stage.
“It’s a grind and a hustle but there is nothing else I would rather be doing.”
Finding Big Country is available on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
Asia Youngman – Filmmaker/Director
Asia Youngman had more of a meandering route into filmmaking; while studying psychology and sociology at the University of Victoria, filmmaking was always on her mind. “The idea of leaving UVic and going to film school was scary at the time,” she admitted. But while working in the public health sector in Vancouver, Youngman started to teach herself how to make videos for online projects and leapt into Vancouver Film School, studying special effects. She made her first film while she was at VFS, and admits she had low expectations of it at the beginning. “I didn’t really expect it to be anything. It was supposed to be up on display at the airport, as this visual piece. That’s the way I saw it. It started getting into film festivals and whatnot, and I was like okay I guess it’s a film.” Lelum caught the attention of others too, winning the Best Documentary at the imagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto in 2017.
Her current project, This Ink Runs Deep, was commissioned by the CBC and premieres at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s basically about the revitalization and reclaiming of Indigenous tattoo practices,” she explained. “We feature four different artists across Canada who are doing their own reclamation and a lot of it to is giving back to the youth and making sure we are passing along the traditions.”
Youngman’s next project will be a new venture for her, as it will be her first narrative film. She has received funding from the Shorts-to-Features program with the Bell Media’s Harold Greenburg fund. “They give $20,000 for a project that is under 10 minutes. It’s a narrative project so it’s going to be my first short narrative film so I’m very excited about that,” Youngman said, adding that she has a year to deliver the project and hopes to shoot in the spring.
Holly Pavlik – Editor
A veteran of the editing and special effects industry, Holly Pavlik has always had a love for the slightly odd. Her latest project, The Seahorse Trainer, is an artistic piece and a nod to the slightly odd. Pavlik got involved with a group of friends, including the co-directors Ricardo Bonisoli and Babak Bina and writer Rodmon Sevilla, to produce the short film after they had expressed interest in creating an indie project, something she had extensive experience in. “I knew the basic fundamentals of what’s behind making an indie film, and all the trials and tribulations that go along with it,” she says.
The Seahorse Trainer, Pavlik says, was the brainchild of her three friends. It tells the fantastical story of an elderly man who trains a seahorse to do amazing acrobatic stunts. “They wanted to tell a story that was super unconventional and strange,” says Pavlik, who loved the idea from the beginning and added her editing and special effects skills to the project.
The film premiered opening night at the Seattle International Film Festival and won one of the three jury awards at the festival, which allows the producers to submit the film to the Oscars and the Academy Awards. Since premiering in Seattle, the film has also been to festivals in Utah, Mexico and Los Angeles.
Pavlik took an interest in film in high school, working on a Public Access talk show as a high school project. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from UVic, she went to film school in Vancouver, with the intent to make movies. She spent hours teaching herself on Garage Band and iMovie.
“I could make whatever I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted. It was right there at my fingertips,” she recalled.
The first project she edited was a McDonald’s contest for the McChicken Wrap. The project came in second place, and she was officially hooked. While Pavlik has been in the film industry for more than a decade, she recently left her position as a visual effects editor at Sony to allow more room for side hustles. What she loves about the work is simple: it’s collaboration.
“I love working with people where everyone has the same goal in mind. I get off on stuff like that.”
Leah loves a stiff drink, is obsessed with Saturday Night Live, and lives for her cats. She’s the most articulate date you’ll ever have. Voting turns her on.
