A scene from Do I Know You From Somewhere? Courtesy of TIFF
Last year proved to be an exciting and engaging time for filmmakers and other visual artists in New Brunswick and the Maritimes at large. The Silver Wave Film Festival, hosted in-person across Fredericton from November 7 – 10 with streaming online continuing until Nov 14. It has now been over a quarter century of Silver Wave’s existence, with the initial inception for the festival dating back to 2000 as an exhibition of work from NB Film Co-op members. Split between the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, the Fredericton Playhouse, our own Tilly Hall’s auditorium, and the Gallery on Queen’s fine art gallery, the festival displayed a diverse showing of genres, themes, and artists. The main attraction of last year’s festival, and a piece increasingly breaking out from the Maritimes to the international stage, was the film Do I Know You From Somewhere?
Do I Know You From Somewhere? is the feature-length directorial debut from filmmaker Ariana Martinez, Instructor of Foundation Visual Arts at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. Shot on location across Fredericton, the film features settings from Fredericton such as the Delta Hotel and a residential home near the Mactaquac Dam. Collaborating with other faculty members, alumni, as well as current STU, UNB, and NBCCD students, this film has a local touch that is immediately distinguishable.
A surreal, romantic drama, the plot centers on portraying the possibilities and regrets of ‘what ifs?’ across relationships. Through a collision of parallel universes, our protagonist must work out a tangled web of butterfly effects between two radically different partners encountered on the same night. After the festival screening in Tilly Hall, the lead actress of the film Caroline Bell alongside two of the crew members, another cast member, as well as Martinez herself hosted a Q&A with the audience about the film’s production and reception. The crew discussed the quirks of filming in town such as using mashed potatoes as a substitute for snow. Additionally, they acknowledged the emotions of holding a hometown showing of the film soon after travelling halfway across the world to participate in a screening at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival the month prior. Additionally, Do I Know You From Somewhere? Was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival as well as at the Atlantic National Film Festival in Halifax.
Besides our hometown feature, numerous other genre-bending exhibitions were on display during the festival. The focus of films included early pandemic quarantine-fuelled skits that found enough success to be developed as a short film, tracing familial ancestry though the Holocaust using analogue film as a focal point, multiple showings of interpretive experimental dance, and reimaginings of earlier experimental short films from previous New Brunswick artists. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of the local creative scene was clearly illustrated throughout the festival. After the success of last year’s headliners, the expectations are high for Silver Wave now in 2025!
