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SASKATOONEXPRESS - March 16-22, 2015 - Page 1
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Volume 12, Issue 11, Week of March 16, 2015
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper
Ink Fest Tattoo Arts Film Festival M
first of its kind
Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express
ark Allard got his first tattoo when he was 19 years old and living in Suffolk, England. His mother wasn’t too pleased, fearing her son might become a degenerate. Now, almost 10 years later, Allard has 34 tattoos by his estimate and is on the cusp of making cinematic history — right here in Saskatoon. Allard has organized the Tattoo Arts Film Festival to be held on April 4 and April 5 at the Roxy Theatre. It is the first of its kind anywhere, he said. The festival has Allard’s mother’s stamp of approval. She realized her son wasn’t a delinquent and wouldn’t become one because of his love of ink. Allard has combined a number of his passions, including tattoo collecting, in planning the festival. “It’s kind of a strange journey,” said Allard, who is the assistant manager at Rainbow Cinemas and the Roxy Theatre. “It is partially mixed in with my background in filmmaking. I have a degree in film and television production. During my time in the U.K., I realized a couple of independent documentaries, which gained some Internet releases in Russia, Korea and India as well. So there is some kind of stuff like that that kind of propelled me into the filmmaking world. It never became paid. There were successes, definitely, and definitely some notoriety, but it never led to a full-time career. “Instead I started to develop this career in events management within the cinema industry, and that came from working in the cinema industry in England and doing promotions in the cinema industry.” He said he has learned how to navigate a successful event and how to steer away from events that aren’t successful. “It is combining those experiences and understanding how the artistic process works in filmmaking – coming to learn how distribution works and then learning how events management works and then how the cinema industry can correlate with all of that. Before becoming a tattoo collector and getting so many tattoos, you learn about that industry as well. It’s taking all those little niches and nooks and crannies of knowledge and fashioning them into something that can work.” The festival will feature six films, as well as a documentary on the tattoo scene in Saskatoon. “Saskatoon has a huge tattoo scene, so much so that one of the big and major Canadian tattoo conventions is held here
Mark Allard says you don’t have to have tattoos to enjoy the movies at his festival (Photo by B. Jonathan Michaels) every year. So you have the Saskatoon Tattoo Expo. And you can correlate that to the really big ones in Vancouver and Toronto, which, I guess, is something important for the Prairies.” The Tattoo Arts Film Festival isn’t just for tattoo artists and collectors, he stressed. The festival will feature good movies from around the world. Anyone and everyone
will enjoy them, he said. “The movies we have for the Tattoo Arts Film Festival aren’t necessary tattoocentric. It is a very mild underpinning. It is a theme and the theme that launches us into these films is tattoo. The whole narrative of those movies takes us into their own dynamics and their own narratives. They are very human stories in these
movies, not just tattoo-lover movies. These are not movies just tattoo lovers will be interested in.” He cites a couple of examples. “There is one about indigenous issues that faced the people of Tahiti, like the way colonialism stripped them of their art forms and stripped them of cultures. (Continued on page 4)