Culture

NowPublic at Whistler Film Festival 2008

by Jarrett Martineau | December 3, 2008 at 05:03 pm

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NowPublic will be providing coverage of the 2008 Whistler Film Festival, held annually in the snowy foothills of alpine sport mecca Whistler, BC.

The four day festival and conference will include a wide range of film screenings, filmmaker forums, and industry panels and discussions.

In addition, the 2008 festival has partnered with the music micro-conference, Transmission, to bring music performances to the otherwise movie-centric events.

Track NowPublic's coverage on our Whistler Film Festival 2008 channel.

The future of the film and music industries is high on the agenda in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., this week. While audiences get their movie and music fix at, respectively, the Whistler Film Festival and Transmission: Live's three nights of gigs in Vancouver, executives representing the twin pillars of the entertainment industry plan to sit down and face a few demons.

The Whistler Film Festival's Filmmaker Forum begins today, as does Vancouver's third annual Transmission international music conference. Both art forms face similar issues in a world of increasingly fragmented audiences and technology that has turned distribution and copyright controls on their heads. After two days of brainstorming, the two groups of industry leaders will converge in Whistler for the inaugural Whistler Summit.

Among the speakers on Saturday's panel are Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and film director Brett Gaylor.

I have been asked to moderate a panel on the future of intellectual property for filmmakers working in the digital era — aptly entitled "R.I.P. IP" and Brett Gaylor's film RiP: A Remix Manifesto, will be one of our key case studies.

Gaylor's documentary, Rip! A Remix Manifesto, is a call to dismantle the current copyright laws and create a system for monetizing sampling and peer-to-peer networks. The film recently snagged the Dioraphte Audience Award at Amsterdam's 21st International Documentary Film Festival. The Montreal-based filmmaker, originally from B.C., started working on it six years ago, prompted by the outlawing of file-sharing network Napster.

I will be posting daily festival updates and photos to NowPublic and also to Twitter.

Keep track of all the coverage on NowPublic's WhistlerFilm08 channel.

More soon!