While the Yorkton Film Festival has maintained its roots in Saskatchewan, 2020 offered a chance to grow them deeper: It’s the first year the hefty, bronze Golden Sheaf trophies were produced in the province, 30 kilometres down the road from Regina, in Pense.
Nephew of the late visual artist Joe Fafard, Phillip Tremblay cast the trophies, which range in weight from 2.5 to nearly seven pounds, at Pense’s Julienne Atelier Inc. Foundry. Fafard, well known for his metal sculptures, opened the foundry in 1985.
“It means a lot … It was pretty nice to hear we’re only two hours away and we could do their job just like that for them,” Tremblay said.
Created in 1958, the Golden Sheaf Awards had first been produced at a Winnipeg-based foundry, the idea originating with a Winnipeg Free Press film critic attending the award show.
“It’s funny, because we always seem to sell ourselves short in Saskatchewan, thinking ‘well, there’s no one else that can do that, we’d have to go look abroad,’” Tremblay, who manages the foundry, said.
“That’s why Joe sort of did make this foundry, because he would have had to go somewhere quite far to be able to get his work cast … That’s what’s kind of neat about where we are; when we’re isolated in a way that we’re just able to do it here.”
Prior to 2020, the trophies were produced by a bronze company in Pittsburgh, Penn., which outsourced the labour to Mexico.
When Tremblay first got the call in late 2019 from the festival’s organizers, he felt honoured. “I grew up not too far out of Yorkton, and I remember (the film festival) being a big thing.”
After recasting a new mould to model the trophies, Tremblay and the foundry team used it to create ceramic shells. The shells held the scalding-hot bronze that formed the wheat sheafs.
“2,050 degrees fahrenheit,” he said of the molten metal’s temperature.
Once hardened, with the ceramic shells chipped away, the sheafs were dipped into a patina-coloured liquid to give them a golden finish.
“I have a two-year contract to keep casting these for them,” Tremblay said.
Another change for this year's festival, albeit unexpected, was the need to ship the Golden Sheafs by mail to this year’s winners.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, festival organizers had to host a virtual awards gala on June 18 with help from local telecom Access Communications. Award nominees participated by tuning in online to see if they won their respective categories.
Daniel Stark, based in Prince George, B.C., won the Best of Fest and the Best Documentary History & Biography awards for his short film Mr. Berry.
It’s about an elderly Indo-Canadian, who derives his life’s meaning from teaching young people the ins and the outs of mathematics, whether calculus, algebra or basic multiplication.
“I was completely floored by the fact that we were winning awards this year,” Stark said of himself, producer Jason Hamborg and his 6ix Sigma production company. “There was still a long way to grow to be able to have the same recognition as the films I watched the year before, but it was an incredible surprise.”
He received his Golden Sheafs after they were shipped out of Yorkton on July 23.
“I was very excited to have this bundle of wheat in my hands, just because it's such an interesting-looking award. As soon as I got it, I needed to go and take this to Mr. Berry.”
Stark said his film’s humble subject, Mr. Berry, accepted them with a condition.
“He is the least trophy-driven human being. He couldn't care less about awards. (But) he's happy to put (them) on his mantel and say, ‘look at what my new friend has won,’ and then he's happy to talk about the documentary. He's happy to talk about his story, but it has to be him bragging on somebody else's behalf.”
Stark says he’s proud a film crew from a smaller, out-of-the way community can earn such recognition.
“Being from Prince George, you do sometimes feel if you're not in Vancouver, you're not going to be taken seriously.
“Then you find out that there's this very serious film festival in a place like Yorkton, and they're more than happy to watch films by people in small towns and give them the same respect that Yorkton feels like they deserve. You connect with that and realize there's amazing things happening everywhere,” he said.
