The Van Helsing Cast – 2022 Leo Awards Nominations

Area 33 Posted on by
Rukiya Bernard - The Blactor poster

Rukiya Bernard

Rukiya Bernard (Doc in 28 Episodes) wrote and directed THE BLACTOR, a short film about a young black actor (Kadidja Watson played by Keeya King) who is mistaken for a gangster by a local cop (Mark Hildreth) as she’s leaving an audition. Bernard told Sabrina Furminger of YVR Screen Scene: “I wanted to make a dark comedy…so in the script I had a stereotypical gangsta bitch dialogue that the protagonist would have with the cop. And I thought how awful and oddly funny it would be if she had to do her lines to prove she’s actually an actor and not the character that she’s auditioning for.” THE BLACTOR, which had its premier at the 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival, received eight Leo Awards nominations: Best Short Drama, Best Director, Best Screenwriter, Best Picture Editing, Best Musical Score, Best Costume Design, Best Performance Male (Mark Hildreth), and Best Performance Female (Keeya King). (King was Violet in 19 Van Helsing episodes).

Aleks Paunovic and Jonathan Scarfe - Van Helsing

Julius (Aleks Paunovic) and Axel (Jonathan Scarfe) first catch sight of Nina in Carpe Noctis

VAN HELSING is nominated for Best Dramatic Series

Aleks Paunovic (Julius in 35 episodes) is nominated for Best Lead Performance Dramatic Series (Male) for “Graveyard Smash” (Episode 5.7).

Beverly Huynh, Nikola Stojisavljevic, Karley Schroyen, Evan Couillaud, and Stephanie Shanklin are nominated for Best Costume Design – Dramatic Series for their work on “Lumina Intunecata” (Episode 5.3). Continue reading →

The Songs of War and Alpha Yankee

Area 33 Posted on by

MAYDAY – a film by Karen Cinorre – SPOILERS

Grace Van Patten - Anastasia enters the alternate world - Mayday

Anastasia enters the world of the Sirens

This feminist fable is set in the psyche of Anastasia (Grace Van Patten), and as the story begins we find Ana waking up after a friend (Dimitri, played by Théodore Pellerin) knocks on her car window. (She has been sleeping in her car outside the restaurant where she works.) The restaurant is preparing to host a wedding; a severe storm is approaching; and, for Ana, the everyday horrors of her existence will soon give way to the comparatively subdued horrors of warfare. Co-worker Dimitri, who will be performing at the wedding, points out to Ana that he still needs a singer.

ANA: “Don’t look at me.”
DIMITRI: “You’re a natural.”
ANA: “I’m not that kind of girl, Dimitri.”
DIMITRI: “Never had much luck with the ladies.”

During preparations for the wedding we are introduced to The Headwaiter (the film’s primary antagonist, played by Frano Mascovic), a kindly chef named Max (Zlatco Buric), The Groom (Hyoie O’Grady) who is fawned over by The Headwaiter, The Bride who is ignored by everyone except Ana, and a Wedding Photographer (Nathaniel Allen) who takes Ana’s picture and asks her who she is. (“I’m nobody,” she responds.) There is also a mysterious Bathroom Attendant (Juliette Lewis) who comforts (?) the unhappy bride-to-be, saying: “I know it feels like a nightmare. That’s normal.”

The power goes out after a particularly unpleasant encounter with The Headwaiter, and Ana takes the opportunity to flee to the basement to throw the breaker. Sparks fly when she does, and she is drawn toward a kitchen oven by a woman’s voice repeating a distress call, and, like an unusually cooperative version of Gretel, begins to climb inside. Almost immediately, she finds herself adrift in the ocean. Continue reading →

Romance, Art, and Mystery in Paris

Area 33 Posted on by

L’ART DU CRIME – created by Angèle Herry-Leclerc & Pierre-Yves Mora

Nicolas Gob and Eleonore Bernheim

Verlay and Chassagne examine a clue in “The Curse of Osiris” (Episode 3.3)

Season Five of the adventures of Parisian art crime investigators Florence Chassange (Eléonore Bernheim) and Police Captain Verlay (Nicolas Gob) has been released, and its first story, Un coeur de Pierre, is an Agatha-Christie-like puzzle mystery that hearkens back to the show’s first episode, which was not Christie-like in any way but did focus on the same character (Pierre Chassange) and the same subject (betrayal).

Pierre (played by Philippe Duclos) is the father of Florence, who is an art historian (like her dad). Florence is also an intellectual reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers’ amateur detective Harriet Vane. In fact, the entire series evokes thoughts of Sayers, though Florence’s co-protagonist Antoine Verlay is a complicated policeman with learning disabilities and anger issues and is nothing at all like Peter Wimsey. Verlay would be better described as a somewhat subdued version of MOONLIGHTING‘s David Addison.

Florence and Antoine are in love with one another, but insist upon not being aware of that. One would think that after five years, that premise would become tiresome, but the mysteries that confront them are sufficiently fascinating that their not being together continues to seem frustratingly natural. Continue reading →