Summer Reading Series 8: Award-Winning Arts & Entertainment

Two days hence and the stars and starlets of Hollywood will park their jets in Hogtown for the Toronto International Film Festival, and you’ll pardon this blogger if he’s camped at the corner of Bellair and Cumberland streets ready to ambush Shia LaBeouf or Gwyneth Paltrow and get them to plug the new National Magazine Awards eBook (free download on iTunes) to their Twitter followers.

Apropos of which, this week’s installment of our Summer Reading Series is cinematically themed: 3 award-winning stories from the category Arts & Entertainment with a nod to the film industry descending on our fair city.

These stories and so many more can be found in the National Magazine Awards archive (magazine-awards.com/archive).

1. “Man Standing” by Timothy Taylor, Canadian Art (2011 Silver winner in Arts & Entertainment)
Canadian Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk is no stranger to TIFF; his masterpiece Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner won the honour of Best Canadian Feature Film back in 2001. Timothy Taylor travels (with NMA-winning photographer Donald Weber) to the Arctic hamlet of Igoolik to interview Kunuk about his latest film, Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. It’s a rare opportunity to acquaint oneself with the ecology of this transcendent artist, who by rights and geography is more than a bit removed the rest of the country yet has helped his audiences (and his neighbours) redefine their notions of history.

“Walking around Igloolik, meanwhile, I sense the reach that Kunuk’s work has had in the community. He downplays it, saying, ‘My hunting buddies are still my hunting buddies.’ But if you’ve watched his films closely, you recognize a surprising number of faces in town. Even people I don’t recognize turn out to have had off-camera roles, like the woman I speak with at the high school who is proud that she learned to sew traditional caribou-skin parkas while working in the wardrobe department for Atanarjuat.” [Read more]

2. “My Dad, the Movie and Me” by Noah Richler, The Walrus (2010 Gold winner in Arts & Entertainment)
The son of the late Canadian literary icon Mordechai Richler is more than just behind the scenes on the Montreal sets of Barney’s Version, the Richard Lewis adaptation (starring Paul Giamatti, Minnie Driver and Dustin Hoffman) of Richler’s famous novel. Noah Richler employs his unique position intersecting the writer and the film to reflect on his father’s notions of family, marriage and sense of belonging; the re-animation of his father’s personality through the title character is both stimulating and calming.

“Barney’s Version, like his earlier novels St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now, draws on my parents’ exemplary love and what, even to his death, struck my father as the wild unlikelihood of having been able to love and raise a family with this striking woman. From Jake Hersh’s beloved wife in St. Urbain’s Horseman (‘Nancy. Nancy, my darling’) to the third Mrs. Panofsky of Barney’s Version (‘Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire’), there exists in his work a portrait of the shiksa wife as love object that his author hero is stunned to have acquired but also believes, in some buried and persecuted Jewish part of himself, he is besmirching.” [Read more]

3. “L’étoffe des héros” (“Heros’ Fabric”) by Mélanie Saint-Hilaire, L’actualité (2010 Silver winner in Arts & Entertainment)
Nine-time NMA finalist Mélanie Saint-Hilaire was the runner up to Noah Richler in 2010 for her scintillating portrait of Quebec costume designer Mario Davignon, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated couturiers whose atelier is stuffed with period-piece designs that have draped such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio (in Romeo + Juliet), Sophia Loren (Between Strangers) and the legendary Ava Gardner (City on Fire).

“Sa passion, c’est le vêtement d’époque. Ce maniaque du démodé pille les antiquaires partout où il va. Il en rapporte des artefacts bizarres, telle cette unique botte rouge qui aurait jadis galbé le mollet d’une tragédienne russe — « pour le modèle », se justifie-t-il. Sa bibliothèque ploie sous les livres de référence, les vieux catalogues et La mode illustrée, encyclopédie française du 19e siècle.” [Lire la suite]

Read these stories and more at the National Magazine Awards archive: magazine-awards.com/archive.

Previous editions of our Summer Reading Series: Travel | Essays | Sports & Rec | Fiction | Personal Journalism | Poetry | Best Short Feature