MOVIES

MOVIES Barring a miracle, Black Dog Video is closing shop

by Mike Usinger

After outlasting one-time behemoth Blockbuster by almost a decade, Black Dog Video has announced that it’s closing for good.

First opening its doors in the mid-’90s on Cambie, the Vancouver institution has operated on Commercial Drive since 2005.

In a newsletter to customers, owner Darren Gay said the decision was one of the hardest of his life. Citing spiralling operating costs combined with the convenience of renting movies on streaming services, he called the closure something that was a long time coming.

“It’s finally time to rip that band-aid off and pull the trigger so to speak,” Gay wrote. “Business has been on a decline for years while costs–rent, etc–have steadily risen. We just can’t feasibly stay open any longer. We lost the war to, what I call, the ‘convenience of mediocrity’ that is streaming et al.”

He continued with: “Unless some kind of miracle comes along–maybe a wealthy benefactor takes us under their wing or a long-lost relative wills me their fortune (yes, I’m willing to spend a night in a haunted house!)—then we will be closing our doors come the end of June (tentative date as I’m on the hook with my lease until February).”

Black Dog Video carried the latest Hollywood blockbusters and critically acclaimed indie films, but the real greatness of the store was its collection of films that aren’t available on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crave, or Apple TV.

After striking out everywhere on the digital front, Black Dog was where you could find David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury, and the ’70s car-chase classic Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

But being a go-to destination for hardto-find films wasn’t enough to pay the bills at Black Dog.

“It breaks my (and the staff’s) hearts to have to do this as I’ve loved this job and feel damn lucky and privileged to have been able to bring the world of cinema to Vancouver for so long,” Gay said. “It’s going to be a difficult next few months. I want to thank all of you who came through our doors over the years and especially the ones who stuck with us till the end—a proper eulogy is still to come. Dark days indeed.”

Black Dog is currently pricing stock for sale to the public, with that date likely to be May 22. In the meantime the store remains not only open but a great place to find Illustrious Corpses, Mill of the Stone Women, and Revenge. g Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s

A Vancouver institution since the mid-’90s, Black Dog Video has been the place to go for not only new Hollywood movies but cult classics that aren’t available on streaming services.

MOVIES Crazy8s director depicts lost culture with horror

by Steve Newton

Raine Mateo stars as Mana in the Maple Ridge-shot horror fantasy “The Faraway Place”, one of six short films completed in only eight days as part of the annual Crazy8s film competition. Indigenous writer-director Kenny Welsh once spent eight months in Dawson City, where he indulged his passion for scary movies by renting as many horror films as he possibly could.

Before he moved to Vancouver to study film at Emily Carr University of Art+Design, Yukon native Kenny Welsh spent eight months in Dawson City. Lucky for him, the old home of the Klondike Gold Rush had a little video rental store where he could score himself 10 movies for around 15 bucks.

“They had a really huge horror-movies selection,” Welsh recalls on the phone from RealWorld Media, the local film production company where he works as an editor, “so most of the time there I just spent watching horror movies all day.”

Welsh’s fondness for scary flicks can be easily ascertained by viewing his short film “The Faraway Place”. One of the six finalists in this year’s Crazy8s competition, it’s a horror fantasy that depicts two people, a young woman and her father, being chased in the woods by red-cloaked villains. The reason they’re being hunted is because they both have horns protruding from their foreheads.

“I wanted to make this film as a metaphor/corepresentation of colonialism,” Welsh says, “because I’m Indigenous, but I didn’t grow up with any of the culture, mostly because my grandparents had gone to residential schools and the culture was lost. And so the horns signify that connection to the culture, and the villains in the film are like a cult, and one of the things they do is to remove the horns to remove that identity from them.

“So with ‘The Faraway Place’ I wanted to get a better understanding of how that culture was lost,” he stresses, “and just tell the story of that. And then from here on, as I grow and learn more about the culture, I plan on telling more stories about it as well.”

In 2014, while attending Yukon College (now Yukon University) in Whitehorse, Welsh met fellow filmmaker PoChun Chen, and they’ve been together ever since. Chen produced “The Faraway Place” and also directed “Fish”, a gruesome threeminute horror film for which Welsh served as director of photography and sound designer. It took third place at the 2019 Artlist Horror Film Contest.

“That was a project that was really last minute,” he says. “We heard about this contest from a friend of ours and we were like, ‘Okay, let’s get one of our friends to act in it and we’ll just shoot it over the weekend and edit it and then submit it.’ And then, surprisingly, we ended up in third place.”

In the spring of 2020 four years of studies paid off for Welsh when he graduated from Emily Carr with a bachelor’s degree in film and screen arts.

“Emily Carr wasn’t incredibly focused on the technical aspects of making film,” he points out. “It was more the theory behind it and the history and culture behind film. How to tell stories. I think that really helped shape how I came up with the concept of ‘The Faraway Place’ and what I wanted to say with it.”

It was while enrolled at Emily Carr that Welsh became aware of Crazy8s, an eight-day filmmaking challenge that provides funding and support to emerging filmmakers to help them produce a short film. On May 7 at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, Welsh’s work will be screened along with others directed by Stephanie Izsak (“Consumer”), Shakil Jessa (“Imran and Alykhan”), Alireza Kazemipour (“The Gold Teeth”), Derek MacDonald (“Undeveloped”), and Kay Shioma Metchie (“Weeds are Flowers, Too”.)

Welsh says the biggest challenge in finishing his film in eight days came when the original lead actor wasn’t able to make the shoot on the second day, so they had to reshoot everything from the first day. But he also feels like the best thing about “The Faraway Place” was the acting, especially that of Raine Mateo, who took over the lead role of Mana.

“She was originally cast in one of those side-villain roles,” Welsh notes, “and then because of the issue with the lead actress leaving the film, her coming in on the second day and pulling it off, doing such a good job of it, I was very impressed with that. But all the actors were amazing.”

Growing up surrounded by forest in a small Yukon town, Welsh developed a love for the outdoors and the stark beauty of nature. Filming “The Faraway Place” at the BCIT Forest Society Woodlot 0007 in Maple Ridge made him feel right at home\—although maybe not quite as cold.

“I wanted nature to play a big role in the film and in the production side of it as well,” he says. “I wanted to make sure while we were there interacting with nature that everyone was respectful of it.”

When he isn’t busy telling stories through film, Welsh also makes music on the side, recording under the moniker Eat Your Friends.

“I kind of bounce around everywhere,” he says of his musical style. “I started way back doing metal, then I kinda transitioned into electronic music for a while, then hiphop, and now kinda back into metal again— but combining it with hip-hop.”

Welsh is currently developing a pitch for Vancouver Film Studios’ Indigenous Film Bursary, which is open to all Indigenous people aged 16 and over in B.C. and includes $5,000 to make a film as well as lighting and grip equipment from Pacific Backlot and soundstage space at VFS. He also has big plans—and high hopes—for “The Faraway Place”, whether it takes the top prize at Crazy8s or not.

“I’m actually in the middle of writing the feature-length script for it right now,” he says. g

I wanted to make this film as a metaphor…of colonialism.

– director Kenny Welsh

The Crazy8s gala screening and afterparty takes place May 7 at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts .