The VIFF's Film & Television Forum, Western Canada's four-day industry event launches its 21st year with a focus on content. The event, which takes place 27- 30 September, features master classes, seminars, workshops, tete-a-tete sessions and industry networking events.

Newly appointed Forum Program Director Helen du Toit says, "Strong content is the key to all success stories." Du Toit adds, "In such a competitive marketplace, we need to be bolder with our original content, and savvier about pitching and packaging."

"This is my boat. I got it the way I like it. You take up space and you slow me down." - Mariner, Waterworld

The future never gets here fast enough until it's the past.

It is certainly true of optical storage and right now blue laser technology.

Self proclaimed experts have been declaring each (BD, HD DVD) is winning and each is losing for months. Others proclaim that it will be DOA.

Let's put this in perspective:

"Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly...stupid." - Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Sparrow was right! Honest people do/say stupid things. Reviewers said the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, Dead Man's Chest, would be a bomb. It still racked up record ticket sales of $258.2 million in its first 10 days.

Geoffrey, does working for the small screen equate to shooting a feature?

Alex Pettyfer is quite a discovery, he really holds the screen playing Alex Rider doesn't he?

"If you look at the trailer, when the teacher says 'Alex Rider have you prepared something for us?' and he looks up and says 'yes sir', there is so much going on in that face at that little moment. It's the first moment in the film, I always used to say when we were on the set that the audience will love or hate it at that moment. That's when they'll decide if they're going to enjoy the film, when they first see the boy playing Alex Rider and the first thing he does.

Are you prepared for this role to make you a heartthrob for teenage girls everywhere?

"I don't think about that yet. But hopefully, touch wood."

How did you get the role?

"I was the first person they saw, and oddly enough the last person too. I went through this gruelling process of audition after audition. I finally got to the stage where I thought I couldn't face another one, but that was when they offered me the role. It was fantastic, a great opportunity."

Mike Figgis talks about the preview of Liebestraum and a short clip shot on the small Scottish isle of Iona Both of these clips are many years old and were only recently digitised to help illustrate my review of ADS Tech's Pyro Link, an analogue video to DV convertor.

Footage on videotape doesn't last for ever. I know this having recently looked at some Hi-8 footage shot around a decade ago to discover all sorts of glitches and fall out in the images, which I remember being virtually pristine. I'm not sure whether this is a case of seeing with the fresh eyes of an era where image quality has improved significantly, or I selectively edited out of my memory all the glitches in the footage, or the footage is just aging. Probably all of the above.

A star since his 1987 movie debut in Withnail & I, in the years since Richard E Grant has appeared in a wide variety of films for directors as respected as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. Now he has made his own directorial bow with Wah-Wah, a semi-autobiographical tale based upon his formative years in 1960s and '70s Swaziland at the end of colonial rule.

How are a medieval mathematician, the petals on a daisy, and the length of women's skirts related to scarier frighteners at the box office?In the last few years, we have entered a fertile era for horror movies. Unfortunately, this period will also be accompanied by one of the greatest economic depressions that humankind has ever known and one that could be accompanied by political instability and war.