COMING IN FROM THE COLD.

This article focuses on the Whistler Film Festival and the Canadian film industry. It's one of the most unforgettable scenes in Canadian cinema: as a steam locomotive rounds a mountain curve, belching a huge column of black smoke, a rider on the tracks up ahead tries to outrun it with a herd of rustled horses, then sends them galloping down the steep embankment at the last minute as the train hurtles past their flanks, perilously close. Borsos was a filmmaker with an exquisite eye for character and landscape, English Canada's answer to Quebec's Claude Jutra (Mon Oncle Antoine). Last week I hosted a tribute to Borsos at the fourth annual Whistler Film Festival, as it inaugurated a $10,000 prize for Canadian features in his name. You start to wonder what's up with this industry when, after riding a gondola through the dark to a mountaintop party, you end up in a room with two guys from Toronto so frustrated by filmmaking in Canada that they've been driven to make satirical movies about it. But both O'Brian and McKellar, along with most of the Canadian film industry, have been cheered by a recent bit of news: the appointment of Wayne Clarkson as the new executive director of Telefilm Canada, which dispenses some $250 million a year for film and TV production.