Aliyah O’Brien is a versatile actress, an advocate for self-love, and a happy wanderer who has ambled ’round the world. Aliyah is beloved for her work as one half of #Golly on Rookie Blue, for playing a brilliant detective on Take Two, and for fun roles in series like DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Bates Motel, You Me Her, and Sanctuary. In this fun and fascinating conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger (facilitated by generous pours of Zirkova Vodka), Aliyah reflects on what she’s learned on her happy wanderings around the world and through this industry, and also talks courting magic, “uncoupling” with love, acting opposite Amanda Tapping on Sanctuary, and her new podcast, This Juicy Life. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

Aleks Paunovic (Snowpiercer) and Tahmoh Penikett (Battlestar Galactica) didn’t exactly hit it off when they first met in acting class more than 20 years ago, but the friendship they built in the intervening years is the stuff of legend. In the third of our #IndustryBFFs series, these best bros bring us into the inner workings of their epic friendship, and discuss the myriad of ways their friendship informs how they navigate this really weird business. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

This is the fifth episode in our ongoing #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry. 

May is Asian Heritage Month, and to paraphrase Sandra Oh, it’s an honour to celebrate the depth and breadth of what it means to be Asian. Asian is a big word; Asia is comprised of nearly 50 countries, billions of people, thousands of cultures and languages and ways of life. So when we celebrate Asian Heritage each May, we are celebrating billions of threads that weave together to become the dazzling, storied, and vast continent that is Asia. But for those of us in the diaspora, Asian Heritage Month is tinged with the knowledge that it can be dangerous to be Asian. During the pandemic, hate crimes against Asians in Vancouver rose nearly 3000%. So when we in the diaspora celebrate our Asian heritage during this month, we do so with defiance. We want to revel in our cultural heritage. We want to claim our joy.

Joy – and joy as a form of resistance – are central in the music video for Different Than Before. The song was written and performed by Amanda Sum and the video was directed by Mayumi Yoshida (Amanda and Mayumi visited the podcast in 2020 to talk about their first collaboration, the video for Groupthink). This new video features an Asian family out for dim sum and karaoke, celebrating the engagement of the their older daughter. There’s lots of laughs, until they’re heckled by a white family. The dad wants them to just ignore the racism. The daughters want – something different.

Different Than Before stars Amanda Sum, Olivia Cheng, Tzi Ma, Sachin Sahel, and Amanda’s mom Linda, and premiered on May 20 on Amanda’s YouTube channel. Amanda and Mayumi join Sabrina for a contemplative conversation about pursuing joy in the face of hate, and how art can change the conversation. 

NOTE: This is our spring season finale! We'll return with new episodes in June. Thank you for getting us this far!

Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

Actress Erin Karpluk is known around the world for her starring role in CBC’s Being Erica, which aired for four seasons in 180 countries and won Erin a Best Actress Gemini Award in 2009 and a Best Lead Actress Leo Award in 2010, and she’s beloved in the local industry for playing Kate, the restaurant manager who experiences an incredible trauma, in the Vancouver-shot Godiva’s. More recently, she led the Hobbie family through five seasons of Family Channel’s Holly Hobbie, and she’s turned in memorable appearances on Debris, Nancy Drew, and Two Sentence Horror Stories. And now she’s exploring what it means to have been married to a sex offender while also working through addiction and a new relationship on A Million Little Things. In this wildly entertaining conversation, Erin reflects on her time as Erica and Kate and talks mental health, time travel, cats, joy, being Anna on A Million Little Things, and what legendary actress Mary Steenburgen said to her that changed her life. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

Bill Newton’s filmography is chock-full of voice performances that are exciting, adventurous, daring, and damn funny. Bill has voiced everyone’s favourite God of Mischief Loki in multiple marvel projects, including Lego Marvel Adventures and Marvel Battleworld: Treachery at Twilight. He was nominated for a 2021 UBCP/ACTRA Award for voicing the dude-bro ogre BrainFreeze in Monster Beach (a performance he based in part on Keanu Reeves). He’s turned in an array of witty, wacky, and wonderful performances in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Ninjago, and Beyblade. And earlier this year, Bill went viral with his dramatic readings of Peggy Blair’s “Dear Martha” tweets, which captured the absurdity of the Ottawa Occupation. In this rollicking conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Bill talks about navigating the voice acting world with an Australian accent, his passion for everything old, becoming Loki, and his experience going viral. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

By the time William B. Davis debuted in the pilot episode of The X-Files as the Cigarette Smoking Man, he’d already built a storied career as a director, acting teacher, and actor on both sides of the Atlantic. William documented his journey to The X-Files in his 2013 book, Where There’s Smoke… Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man – a journey that began with CBC audio dramas when he was a child and continues to this day with roles on popular fare like Amazon Studio’s Upload and Mike Flanagan’s highly anticipated horror series The Midnight Club. 

Despite his busy schedule, William somehow found the time to write a second book: On Acting… And Life, which was released earlier this month and is a celebration of the craft of acting. This new book is rich with anecdotes about directing actors and developing characters, while also providing the kind of practical information about rehearsing, learning lines, and fine-tuning work that actors pay good money for in acting schools. 

In this compelling conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, William reflects on his career (including his time in the Cigarette Smoking Man’s cloud of smoke), and shares what he feels actors need to know in order to build careers that feed their souls. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

What comes to your mind when you hear the words “Doug and the Slugs”? If you live in Canada and grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, you probably think of one of the hottest party bands of the era fronted by the unlikeliest of rockstars: the late, great Doug Bennett. And you probably smile, because songs like “Too Bad” and “Real Enough” and “Making It Work” and “Day By Day” and their accompanying music videos were fun, and because Slugmania was real.

You can revisit the songs and the men who made them in Doug and the Slugs and Me, a fascinating and fun documentary by Vancouver filmmaker Teresa Alfeld about the man that publicist-turned-MuchMusic VJ Denise Donlon describes in the film as “more a carnie than a sex symbol.” The film follows the rise of the Vancouver band and its frontman through archival footage, interviews with band members, Doug’s family, and icons like Ed the Sock, Bif Naked, Ron Sexsmith, and Sir Bob Geldof. We also hear from Doug himself through the journals he left behind. 

Doug and the Slugs and Me is a film about the Slugs, about music, making music, legacy, friendship, ego, dreams, grief, and the documentarian’s starting point, namely: “What happened to this man we thought we knew?”Documentarian Teresa Alfeld – who grew up next to the Bennett family and was best friends with one of Doug’s daughters – visits the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to talk about Doug and the Slugs and her remarkable film, which screens at the 2022 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. Episode sponsored by Fish Flight Entertainment

It’s been six years since the British Columbia government declared the opioid overdose crisis a public health emergency. More than 9,400 British Columbians have died from overdoses since January 2016. 174 people were lost in the month of February 2022 alone. Colin Askey’s film Love In The Time Of Fentanyl goes beyond the cold statistics and to the heart of what’s at stake: human beings in our province, all of whom are worthy of love, care, and respect. Love In the Time of Fentanyl highlights the work of the Overdose Prevention Society, AKA OPS, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. OPS is a low-barrier, peer-run site where people can use their own illicit drugs, access sterile harm reduction equipment, and receive emergency overdose response as needed. 

OPS is run by people who’ve come together to save the lives of people in their community – people they love. And this gift that they’re giving – this gift of their time and space and clean drug rigs and no judgment – is working. No one has died from an overdose at an overdose prevention site. This is what community looks like. This is what harm reduction looks like. This is what love can do.

Love In The Time of Fentanyl screens at the 2022 DOXA Documentary Film Festival. In this compelling conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Colin Askey talks about Love In The Time of Fentanyl and what OPS can tell us about the compassion and care required to save lives during this devastating time. Episode sponsored by Fish Flight Entertainment

Filmmaker Shakil Jessa is determined to make the kind of films he needed to see when he was a queer Muslim teenager. This determination is particularly evident in Imran and Alykhan, a short film about two boys who fall in love at a Muslim youth retreat but have to keep their relationship a secret from those around them; the film will premiere on May 7 at Crazy8s. Shakil recently wrapped his first development deal with WarnerMedia for a story about a queer Muslim teenager going to university for the first time. He was the youngest member to have joined the WarnerMedia Access x Canadian Academy Writers' Program, and he’s currently working on a new limited series about a South Asian teen from Toronto who leads a crime ring that robs $11 million from the world's biggest influencers.

In this boisterous episode of the YVR Screen Scene Podcast, Shakil talks about his experiences bringing queer Muslim stories to the screen, moving into spaces in the industry that don’t have long histories of platforming queer BIPOC filmmakers, and why diversity and representation matter to young people in particular. Episode sponsored by Fish Flight Entertainment

Veteran actresses Gabrielle Rose (The Sweet Hereafter) and Camille Sullivan (Intelligence) like each other very much, and like to work together too. So who better to talk about the joys and challenges of collaboration than these two queens of the Canadian drama scene? In the second episode of our #IndustryBFFs series, Gabrielle and Camille reflect on their friendship and talk camaraderie, chemistry, navigating toxic behaviour, and competition. Episode sponsor: Fish Flight Entertainment