Library & Resources

Praxis Fellows Profile : Frank Borg

Impressed by its emotional intensity, we chose Frank's screenplay West of Sarajevo for our Fall 1996 workshop. It was a story of two Bosnian families — one Muslim, the other Serb — who come to Vancouver but cannot escape the battleground of their memories. When he arrived at Praxis, Frank was already developing this script with director Davor Marianovic, who'd moved here from Sarajevo in 1993. By the time of its workshop reading the following June, word had spread, and producers Mort Ransen and Raymond Massey optioned the script two days after meeting Frank at the Praxis barbecue.

A year later, the film was finished under the title My Father's Angel. It went on to play at numerous international festivals, winning the Fassbinder Award at Mannheim/Heidelberg and a Genie Award for Best Actor Tony Nardi. Frank himself was nominated for a Genie for this, his first produced screenplay.

Frank has gone on to a career as staff writer and executive story editor for the acclaimed TV series Da Vinci's Inquest. This year he was nominated for two Geminis for his writing on the series. He's also a playwright, with productions of Next Door, One-Sided Dime, his adaptation of Albert Camus' The Stranger and the award-winning The Chalk Player — which he's also adapted into a screenplay.

Frank's years of working as a groom and assistant trainer at racetracks across North America has given him the life experience to understand his characters, and his degrees in creative writing from the University of Victoria and UBC have given him the skills to articulate them. Frank is extraordinarily generous in sharing his talents, teaching at the Vancouver Film School in the off-season and, more recently, leading a screenwriting seminar at Praxis and acting as an advisor for several of our Fellows

Various Positions ON FILM

Produced by Karen Powell starring Tygh Runyan and Carly Pope Praxis celebrates a total of twenty feature films produced from scripts in our workshops with Ori Kowarsky's Various Positions.

Kowarsky is a Vancouver entertainment lawyer who studied film at both UBC and UCLA, and worked briefly for James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment before returning to Vancouver and UBC law school.

He came to the Praxis workshop in Fall 1999 and returned for a reading with actors in Summer 2000, making this one of the shortest turnarounds ever for a Praxis script going into production. In the meanwhile Ori also made a short film, Riding the Bus, with a KickStart grant from the DGC, BC Film and Telefilm. It premiered at the Vancouver Film Festival in October 2001.

Various Positions, Ori's first feature, is the story of a UBC law student from an Orthodox Jewish family who falls desperately in love with an elusive and "not-quite-Jewish" art student. Family, religious and emotional conflicts drive the story. It stars hot young Vancouver actor Tygh Runyan, who has also played the lead in two other Praxis screenplays, Touched and My Father's Angel. It is shot on high definition 24fps video, using the Sony-Panavision camera system developed for George Lucas. The producer is Studio B's Karen Powell, herself a lawyer and a veteran of the working-class comedies Tail Lights Fade, Hard Core Logo and Kitchen Party.

Screenwriting Competition

Spring 2002

Colin Aussant • Slapping Al Capone
Colin comes from a print journalim background. He was born in Saskatchewan, educated in Alaska and breathes best on Canada's west coast. He has written two feature film screenplays — his first,  November, has been optioned by May Street Entertainment out of Victoria.

Alan Borden • Survivors
Vancouver-based Alan Borden has been a working screenwriter for over a decade. He has sold and optioned numerous screenplays, his credits including several episodes of the television drama Catwalk. Alan recently received Leo writing nominations two years running for his shorts Untitled and What Else Have You Got?, the latter having taken audience-favorite awards at film festivals in Vancouver and Toronto.

Louise Deschamps • Blue Eyes
Louise was born in Ottawa and has lived in Vancouver for the past 10 years. Following years of various musical studies, Louise graduated from UBC with a music degree in 1997. She has since worked in the film industry, moving towards her goal of writing, producing and directing. A film buff at an early age, Louise hopes to pursue a career in film where she could combine her interest in music with her love of cinematic storytelling.

Neil Every • The Ormering Tide
Neil was born and raised in Jersey, a rock in the English Channel between England and France. He graduated from VFS in 1995, then became an active member of the Vancouver film community working as a camera assistant on a multitude of tv series, features and indies. As writer and director, he won the coveted NSI Drama Prize in 1998 with the short film The Fare. In the last 12 months he has directed two shorts for a project with inner city kids called Indie Kids n' Video, co-wrote, edited and directed the award-winning short film Such a Fine Girl and directed his first feature High Incentive, a digital dogme style film shot in three days which is currently in post. The Omering Tide is Neil's first feature script.

Armen Evrensel • Predicament in Mexico
An NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate of 2001, Dramatic Writing Department. He has written plays produced in Japan, Switzerland, and the West and East coasts of the United States. He was a finalist in the Edward Albee Theater conference play lab of 2001, a semifinalist in the O'Neil play competition 2001. His current projects include developing TV scripts, features, and a video journalism project in the Arab Emirates.

Maria Stanborough • sex, drugs and edgar allen poe
Maria has been a magazine editor, college instructor and columnist during her writing career. Currently she works as a lighting technician for film and tv where she gets to watch what happens to script on set.  sex, drugs and edgar allen poe is her first feature length script.

Garry Wallace • Kenny Clarkes' Best Friends
Garry received his BA in English Literature from UBC and then graduated from the Film Program at UBC. One of his short films, Hustle, produced at UBC, was shown at the Montreal World Film Festival. Garry has recently completed another short, Detour, which was produced with funding from a Kickstart grant from the DGC, BC Film and Rainmaker Digital Pictures post production.