The Whistler Film Festival has announced that it will screen over 40 films at its third annual event December 4 to 7. Among them are five world premieres and 21 feature and mid-length films, many of them favorites from the international festivals of Sundance, Cannes, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The festival will play on three screens at two theatres in Whistler, which is North America’s most popular winter resort.
The world premieres are Ivan Hughes’s “In the Shadow of the Chief,” a local documentary that incorporates never-before-seen archival footage of two young climbers’ inaugural 1961 ascent straight up the middle of the “unclimbable” Stawamus Chief in Squamish, B.C.; “Stealing Cambodia,” a disturbing first dramatic feature by Portland, Oregon filmmaker Mika Kitamura about four Americans who find themselves drawn into Cambodia’s dangerous and pervasive child sex trade; Vancouver-based Jack Silberman’s “The Vanishing Tattoo,” an adventurous documentary that recounts a Canadian tattoo artist’s mission to record the ancient tattoo practices of the Iban people in the jungles of Borneo; Oregon filmmaker Neal Miller’s “Raising Flagg,” a comedy drama about “family, love and the ties that bind,” starring Alan Arkin; and Vancouver filmmaker Robert Vince’s “Most Xtreme Primate,” a youthful comedy starring a snowboarding chimpanzee.
And you really can’t go wrong with chimps, folks.
For more info, visit the Whistler Film Festival website.
