B.C.-made Foreigner and Blue Heron among winners at Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards
Keeper, Tuner, and Forward join Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in prizes for Canada’s top movies of the year
Foreigner
Keeper
TWO INVENTIVE IMMIGRANT stories took top awards at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards last night.
Foreigner, a teen horror film that weaves in the immigrant experience, won the CMPA-BC Award for best B.C. film at the VFCC Awards held at the VIFF Centre. Local director Ava Maria Safai was in attendance to receive the prize for a movie whose script is semi-autobiographical.
Ava Maria Safai at the awards night.
The film boasts a lot of humour, while cross-hatching familiar themes of teen angst, grief, and cultural disintegration. “I stumbled on these research papers on a demon from the Middle East called the Zar,” Safai told Stir during last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, “which possesses people when they immigrate from one country to another. It’s a real phenomenon. For instance, when people would go from Africa to Iran, there would be these weird repeating patterns of people banging their heads against the wall, speaking in tongues, that kind of thing. And it also happened to migrating Iranians. The only way to heal it is through music and beating a drum.”
The versatile talent, who acts, directs, writes scripts, and plays music, all while working as the artistic director of the Harlequin Theatre Society, said she already has her second feature in the works.
Meanwhile, B.C. filmmaker Sophy Romvari won the Telefilm Canada–One to Watch award for her first feature, Blue Heron, also a semi-autobiographical project that is in part a meditation on the immigrant experience. Taking on the dreamlike quality of memory, it starts out with the story of a Hungarian family settling in to a new home on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s, as told through the eyes of the youngest child, and then takes a formal risk that moves it into a different sphere.
In a thank-you speech sent from the Berlin International Film Festival, the director reminisced about studying at CapU, working at the Rio Theatre, volunteering at VIFF, and discovering films at The Cinematheque.
“I did my best to represent the Vancouver and Vancouver Island landscapes within Blue Heron that I know and love, not just in its beauty but also in its social complexity in a way that I know is familiar to many,” she said.
Blue Heron
Elsewhere, the VFCC celebrated the Toronto-set, time-travelling mockumentary Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie with a bunch of awards, including best Canadian movie, best director, and best male actor. Performer-director Matt Johnson sent a series of sarcastic acceptance speeches, and questioned the veracity and credibility of the VFCC, which has handed him several top honours over the years (including an acting nod for last year’s Matt and Mara and best Canadian picture for 2023’s BlackBerry).
Canadian standout Tatiana Maslany took the best female actor prize for her powerful, nuanced performance in Osgood Perkins’s psychological horror Keeper, and producer Chris Ferguson was on hand to pick up the prize and thank the VFCC for recognizing genre films. Scripted by Dangerous Animals’ Nick Lepard and shot mostly in B.C., the movie debuted locally at the Whistler Film Festival in December.
Devon Bostick received the best supporting male actor nod for Mile End Kicks. Alex Rice took home best supporting female actor for her role in the Sixties Scoop–inspired drama Meadowlarks.
Other Canadian winners were Tuner’s Daniel Roher and Robert Ramsey for best screenplay, Nic Collar for his documentary Forward (best B.C. director), and Modern Whore (best documentary).
The night was dedicated to Volkmar Richter, a movie critic who had a 35-year career at CBC Radio before writing film reviews out of Vancouver for the National Observer for the next two decades. He passed away in January.
In international categories, the VFCC crowned One Battle After Another as best picture, and recognized Sean Penn as best supporting male actor for the same film. The reimagined period horror Sinners earned both best director and best screenplay awards. You can find the full list of winners here. 
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