World Film Locations: Vancouver

This book is elegantly designed and packed with evocative film stills, location info, and maps. It is affordable and collectable. It is the only edited and illustrated volume on Vancouver film. It offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes into how Hollywood and independent filmmakers have framed and featured Vancouver locations.

It has broad appeal, focusing on underground and Hollywood titles. The book provides an accessible look at the historical scope of representing the city and addresses the multiple ways it is depicted in contemporary cinema. It works both as a guidebook for tourists and a critical intervention for academics studying the cinematic city.

It features a diverse mix of contributors, including leading scholars and film critics. World Film Locations: Vancouver highlights the work of Canadian filmmakers who have received less attention than they merit, whilst bringing insight into how so-called 'runaway' productions from Hollywood use Vancouver to stand in for other locations, from Seattle, USA to Lagos, Nigeria.

Analyses of 38 different film scenes reveal the cinematic city in its myriad forms, while spotlight essays provide insight into the creativity and contradictions of Vancouver's film industry throughout the ages.

The essays examine various topics: the masking of Vancouver's indigenous stories in filmic representations of the city; Australian screenwriter James Clavell's Vancouver-set debut The Sweet and the Bitter; Sylvia Spring's Madeleine Is..., the first female-directed feature in Canada; Jonathan Kaplan's The Accused, for which Jodie Foster won an Oscar; and the use of Vancouver locations in a number of US television crime series.

World Film Locations: Vancouver offers new perspectives on the west coast city and, in doing so, sheds further light upon the relationship between the movies and the metropolis.