REEL CANADA Media : Press

A low-key program is introducing high-school students to some of Canada's top directors – and their films.

By Brad Wheeler for The Globe and Mail | Feb 24, 2007

Deepa Mehta makes her way to the front of the auditorium as a crowd stands, cheers and whistles. The diminutive director must be bushed – she flew so many kilometres to get here – yet she is energized by the outpouring of admiration. Her Oscar-nominated melodrama Water has just finished screening, and now the audience lobs questions that she's pleased to answer. Read More...

By Alexandra Martineau

For Metro Toronto | Tuesday Feb 20th, 2007

Toronto high school students have started packing popcorn in their lunches as REEL CANADA begins to screen films in their classrooms all this month and next.

"REEL CANADA is a traveling film festival that goes from high school to high school," said Jack Blum, REEL CANADA's executive director. Read More...

Originally published in The Globe and Mail, February 27, 2007

After enduring burning sets, death threats and violent protests, Deepa Mehta drinks in the success of her film, Brad Wheeler finds.

Call it Deepa Goes to Hollywood. Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, nominated for an Academy Award in the category of best foreign language film for Water, is enjoying the Oscar hoopla so much that she's thinking of making a movie about the experience. "The whole sort of hype is fascinating," Mehta told The Globe and Mail yesterday. "You can't put it down, because it really is fun. It's all material for another script," she joked. Read More...

By Marise Strauss for PLAYBACK:

Through makeshift movie theaters in classrooms and gymnasiums, 6,000 Toronto-area high school students are getting a front row view of films by Deepa Mehta, Jean-Marc Vallée, Allan King and others through the Reel Canada Film Festival. The second annual program, now partway through a four-week run ending March 9, aims to raise awareness among Hollywood-minded high school students about Canadian cinema through screenings and Q&A sessions with the filmmakers. Read More...

Program introduces teenage students to homegrown films, their stars and directors 

Bruce DeMara, for The Toronto Star

In a movie worlD dominated by Hollywood blockbusters and with a generation living in a world of video games, iPods and YouTube, how do we get young people to watch Canadian films and realize there's actually a viable industry here?

Here's how: turn high school gyms and auditoriums into movie theatres – with big screens and big sound – and then let them meet the actors and directors behind the cameras. Read More...