People

JASON MARGOLIS is a 2005 Praxis Story Editor Intern and his script Beside Herself was developed through a fellowship from Praxis and IATSE 891. He is a screenwriting instructor at Vancouver Film School, operates the production company Jump Communications Inc. with producing partner Maureen Prentice, and works as a director, writer, story editor, and motion picture editor for several Vancouver production companies. His writing credits include the Global Television documentary Inside Boystown, the Directors Guild Of Canada KickStart short film After Shock, and three award winning shorts for Vancouver's Reel Fast 48 Hour Film Festival.  His articles have appeared in Vancouver Magazine, Vue Weekly and IndieWire.  Last year, his debut feature Lucky Stars premiered at the Calgary International Film Festival.  99 is his second collaboration with Todd Babiak. 

TODD BABIAK's first novel, Choke Hold won the Henry Kreisel award for Best First Book and was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust fiction prize. His second novel The Garneau Block is currently being serialized daily in the Edmonton Journal. His third novel, just finished, is called Toby A Man. He has also co-written two screenplays with Jason Margolis, one based on Choke Hold and the other called 99.  Todd has an MA in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal. Todd has worked in TV, including CHUM's BookTelevision. Currently, he lives in Edmonton, where he is culture columnist for the Edmonton Journal.

99:  Edmonton, 1988: High school sweethearts Owen and Ashley are about to sleep together for the first time.  However, when Wayne Gretzky announces he's leaving for LA, Ashley is too depressed.  Now Owen has to cheer up the City of Champions before he can lose his virginity. 

YELENA NIKOLAEVA received her BA in Film (1995) from the Russian Film Institute in Moscow. She won a scholarship from a student exchange program and went to pursue her graduate studies at Columbia University, New York, where she received her MFA in Screenwriting in 2000. Her thesis screenplay City of Birds won the Best Screenplay Award at the Polo Ralph Lauren New Works Festival in New York, and the Milos Forman Fund Screenplay Fellowship.   Mrs. Nikolaeva has written and directed three short films, two documentaries and over 20 TV programs for ORT (Russia), WMNB and Wostok Entertainment (USA). Her numerous short stories, articles and film reviews (in Russian) appeared in Film Art, Video Ace, Premiere, Us and New Russian Daily. A chapter from her first novel, City of Birds, appeared in Pharos, an English-language magazine published by the British Institute in Paris.

The Trojan Horse tells the story of the arrival of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family that changes the face of a small Ontario town.

HANNES KIVILAHT is a Winnipeg playwright whose work has been produced at the New Ideas Festival and the Toronto Fringe Festival; he was a finalist in Theatre BC's Canadian National Playwriting Competition. He has written four screenplays.

Another Way Out:  A celebrated suicide activist botches his attempt to take his own life.  When forces combine to have him committed, an unlikely duo help him find another way out.

 ARUN LAKRA is an opthalmologist in Calgary who's written a popular book on eye surgery.  His play Blind Spot was workshopped with Sharon Pollack at the Alberta Playwright's Network and had a staged reading at Calgary's Lunchbox Theatre.

Voices:  Inspired by the horrors of Poe and the films of Shyamalan, Voices is a low-budget supernatural thriller which asks the question: What if the little voice inside your head belongs to someone else?

ELAINE LITTMANN is a Vancouver graphic designer with a background in fiction writing. Her short stories have been published in the Journey Prize Anthology, Vital Signs (Oberon) and eye wuz here (Douglas & McIntyre). She was nominated for the 1996 Journey Prize and a Western Magazine Award for fiction, and has received a Canada Council Explorations grant for literature.

Dreamgirl, a dark family drama, pits a young mother trying to hold her family together against the forces — her boyfriend’s criminal past and her own buried secrets — which conspire to pull them apart.

GORDON PENGILLY is a seven-time winner of Alberta playwriting competitions and a three-time winner of national competitions.  His work has been produced in theatres across Canada as well as off-off Broadway, the Netherlands and Japan.  His radio dramas have been broadcast on national CBC, in the U.S. and Australia.  An earlier screenplay, Drumheller or Dangerous Times, won the WGC's Jim Burt Prize for Screenwriting in 2003 and was workshopped at Praxis in 2004. 

Harm's Way:  A college professor combats his panic disorder by moving his family to the country where he takes up astronomy as a hobby. When his sixteen year old daughter runs away with a gun-toting local boy events spin out of control.  The professor goes looking for this daughter in the dead of night with frightening results.