Is the tariff war set to hit Vancouver’s film industry?

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Good morning,

Apologies for Friday, there was a bit of a miscommunication on my end, and we didn’t include the introduction in the newsletter!

Because more and more members keep joining, we’ve been able to invest in more freelancer stories. Arts is something we’re increasingly covering and we’ve got one of those stories today.

Oh, and Trump’s latest tariff announcement yesterday could impact Vancouver. We break it down.

And finally, stay tuned for something important later this week. I won’t spoil it, but it’s been a while since we really checked in with our Lookout community, and I hope you’ve also got some ideas to share with us.

With that, let’s get to today’s newsletter.

—Geoff Sharpe, Lookout managing editor

PS - If you find this newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to your friends. New to the Lookout? Sign-up for free. 

WEATHER

Monday: 16 🌡️ 9 | 🌤️

Tuesday: 20 🌡️ 12 | ☁️

Wednesday: 13 🌡️ 6 | 🌧️

VANCOUVER NUMBERS

📉 2,163: The number of home sales in the Greater Vancouver area in April, down 23.6 per cent from April 2024. That’s also 28.2 per cent below the 10-year seasonal average. [Business in Vancouver]

🏃 25,000: The number of people who took part in the BMO Vancouver Marathon on Sunday, with people from over 60 countries participating. [CBC]

FILM

Is the tariff war set to hit Vancouver’s film industry?

What happened: International relations by tweet continues… President Donald Trump announced yesterday that foreign-produced films would be subject to a 100 per cent tariff, as he claimed that Hollywood was being “devastated” by films being made outside the U.S.

Breaking it down: Well, frankly, we don’t know much. Somehow, he has declared it a national security threat, which enables the President to enact tariffs. According to the Guardian, it was unclear how it would be targeted, since films include filming, production and post-production in different countries.

• Background: Film production in Los Angeles has fallen 40 per cent in the last 10 years. Part of this has to do with governments around the world offering generous tax credits in order to lure those companies to produce films in those countries.

Here at home, the provincial government announced back in December that they were increasing the tax credit for international projects that film in the province from 28 per cent to 35-36 per cent, according to CBC. Back in 2023, the province gave $900 million in subsidies to film projects, of which 80 per cent were foreign companies. The idea behind the credit is that it boosts economic growth, thereby creating jobs in the province.

The impact: The value of film and TV production in BC was $2.3 billion in 2023, according to the Vancouver Sun. Vancouver is the third-largest TV and film production location in North America, and the largest in Canada. Around 26,000 workers are employed in the industry in BC.

What it means: Truly impossible to say at the moment, given the lack of details and how quickly tariffs have been added and removed. But assuming they do get levied on foreign products, it would likely have an impact on jobs in BC and in Vancouver.

• Yes, but: The industry has already faced some major headwinds in BC. IATSE 891, which represents workers in the industry, said that global production has dropped 40 per cent, which has impacted their members, according to CityNews.

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THE AGENDA

🧑‍⚖️ A judge has ordered a psychiatric test of the man accused of the Filipino street festival attack to understand whether he is mentally fit to stand trial. The next appearance in court of Kai Ji Adam Lo is set for May 30. [CityNews]

⛴️ Remember how we wrote that Horseshoe Bay is undergoing major construction upgrades over the next two years? Part of that change now includes a big one for travellers—because vehicle space is declining due to construction, travellers from Horseshoe Bay will now need a reservation. [Vancouver Sun]

⚽️ Can the Whitecaps lose? It sure doesn’t seem like it. The team won 2-1 over Real Salt Lake on Saturday and extended their win streak to 10 in a row. The team is first in the Western Conference, up three wins on Minnesota. 

🏒 There have been rumours that the Canucks are up for sale, but the ownership group maintains that’s not accurate. The one change, though, is that Paolo Aquilini, a member of the ownership group, is resigning his position in the organization and selling his small stake in the team. [Vancouver is Awesome]

🥍 It was a close game, but Vancouver’s professional lacrosse team, the Warriors, lost last night to the top-seeded Buffalo Bandits 11-9. The team is now eliminated from the playoffs after also losing their Friday game in the best-of-three series.

Outside Vancouver

🚎 The approval of TransLink’s investment plan means that the North Shore is getting a RapidBus to Metrotown in about two years time, extending the initial R2 Park Royal that goes to Phibbs Exchange. [North Shore News]

🧑‍⚖️ The province’s plan to overhaul the Mental Health Act after the Filipino festival tragedy last week caused the BC government to move forward faster with the planned overhaul. Previously, they planned to wait until the outcome of a court case that’s been ongoing for almost 10 years, related to the legality of involuntary treatment. The court case will likely start later this month. Premier David Eby has acknowledged that the legality of involuntary treatment is in question, given that governments have lost court cases have in other provinces. [Vancouver Sun]

VANCOUVER JOBS

Discover your new dream job in Vancouver:

• Director, community giving at BC Parks Foundation

• Manager, digital and creative at The UBC

• Compensation advisor, Metro Vancouver

• People partnerships manager at EA

• Program specialist supportive housing and homelessness, BC Housing

ARTS

Stitched at Gordon Smith Gallery explores the boundaries of photograpy

By Kristin Lim

While the 12th annual Capture Photography Festival has officially come to a close, there are still numerous exhibitions and public art projects on view. One such exhibition is Stitched: Merging Photography and Textile Practices at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art in North Vancouver. The series features works from nine different artists. 

Spanning the month of April, the Festival presented lens-based art through a multitude of exhibitions, public art projects, events, and a speaker series across Metro Vancouver, that celebrate lens-based art, and artists who innovatively push the boundaries and disrupt our expectations of the photographic medium. 

This is immediately evident in Stitched—it is a photography exhibition, but it doesn’t look like it. Instead, weaving, beading, sewing, sculpture, and tapestry dominate. Co-curated by Capture’s Emmy Lee Wall, Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Chelsea Yuill, Assistant Curator, the exhibition reveals how contemporary artists use photography and textiles in distinct and interesting ways. 

As the title suggests, Stitched merges two disparate mediums: photography, historically dominated by male practitioners, and textile practices, historically regarded as craft rather than art and in most cases confined within the domestic realm. 

A mix of emerging and established artists, eight of whom are women-identifying, explore “ritual, memory, aesthetic inheritance, immigration, technology, and colonial and embodied archives.” In the catalogue essay, Yuill continues, “In a cultural landscape that continues to become more and more digitized, and a political landscape that becomes ever more cruel, their work asks what it means to create images that evoke the desire to touch and feel.” 

The first work you see when entering the gallery is Maya Beaudry’s Gateway (2025), which consists of a wooden frame made of two-by-fours, wrapped in printed, colourful fabric, with sewn, angel figures. The stitching on the edges remains visible. Commissioned specifically for the exhibition, the structure extends from wall to wall. It serves as a gateway into the exhibition, inviting the viewer to walk around it and through it. The fragmented pieces of imagery printed on the fabric are photographs that the artist has taken around Vancouver, the artist’s hometown, of tear-down houses, perhaps a reflection of the housing crisis and housing market in Vancouver. 

As Wall described in a radio interview on CBC’s North by Northwest, “Photographs in the past have been associated with a document of the truth, some kind of archival knowledge, one-to-one representation of what's out there in the world.” She elaborated, “If you look around the space, you’ll notice that artists are not working in that way anymore, they’re obfuscating the image, making it ambiguous, painting over it, stitching through it, beading on it, obscuring the subject.” She continued, “you have to work at what you’re looking at to get what’s going on in the pictures.” 

After you enter through Gateway, there are two fireboxes at the back of the gallery. These are backlit photographic portraits by Dana Claxton from the artist’s Headdress (2018-23) series. Crisp and precise, these are the only straight photographs in the exhibition, and, as Wall says, “anchor the show.” 

Here, the subjects’ faces are entirely covered in beadwork—bags, jewellery, hair/head accessories—from the models’ personal collections. Claxton describes: “In these portraits, the beadworks cover and espouse the womxn’s silhouettes, becoming more than just objects: the beadworks are cultural belongings, and the womxn are cultural carriers.” 

We also see photography used for its materiality—printed paper—where the captured memory, the document of a specific moment in time, or the perfectly composed photograph, is no longer the focal point. We see this in Jayce Salloum’s photo-sculptures, where he takes personal photos, tears them into smaller pieces, and stacks and threads them, creating long, narrow, undulating sculptures that hang from the ceiling down to the floor. These sculptures are, in fact, fabricated by the artist’s studio assistants, thus, one sculptural tower differs from the other in how the photos have been torn and reassembled. 

In Montreal-based artist Michaël Sergile’s series of Ombre portraits, the artist uses a Jacquard loom to create incredible, woven portraits, based on family photographs from her parents’ generation in Haiti. Some portraits hang on the wall, others are displayed as part of a beautifully constructed wooden screen.

Threads are left to hang from the weavings, further emphasizing the woven nature of the works and their fabric. While these are portraits, the figures are silhouettes without identity. 

In Simranpreet Kaur Anand’s large-scale, multi-faceted installation, titled Wake of Departure, the artist explores the personal and community histories of the Punjab and Punjabi diaspora. Specifically, the work looks at the legacy of Sikh labour protests within the past few generations in British Columbia. 

The installation consists of multiple works, installed specifically for this exhibition, and comprises repeated risograph prints depicting people with megaphones and people yelling, a woven cotton rug in the centre that reads, “100 % no guarantee! DREAM WORLD”, hand-embroidered protest photographs, and photographs that have been deconstructed and re-woven. 

As our daily lives are saturated with digital imagery and media, what’s apparent in Stitched is the emphasis on the handmade, tactile, often laborious work, where photography is an integral part of the work, but not necessarily the end. The works in the exhibition are deeply layered and demand our attention, to consider where the images have come from, which is utterly contrary to the way we have become accustomed to consuming images with the speed of a scroll or swipe.     

FROM THE ARCHIVE

The city wants to radically change housing policy in the Downtown Eastside. Advocates and residents are concerned

About 100 people showed up to a community forum on Thursday after the city unveiled the proposed changes last week.

Over a year with no heat and water leaks for West End tenants

Tenants alleging a lack of timely and effective maintenance in their units and building common areas are getting some compensation, but problems remain.

EVENT GUIDE

DOXA Film Festival | Enjoy documentary screenings, panel discussions, and public forums | Now until May 11, various times and locations | Tickets $19

Stuart Little | The Waterfront Theatre, 1412 Cartwright St. | Now until May 11 | Whimsical play based on E.B. White’s classic | Tickets $19–30

The 2025 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards | Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, 900 West Georgia St. | May 5, 2 pm | Celebrate the city's top restaurants and chefs | Tickets $104

Intro to Bartending Class | Fine Art Bartending School, 432 West Pender St | May 8, 6 pm | Learn cocktail basics, tools and pouring technique | Tickets $54

The Vancouver Facial Hair Competition | Hero’s Welcome, 3917 Main St. | May 10, 5 pm | Charity beard competition, 10 categories | Tickets by donation

Vancouver Chinatown Mural Walks | Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Public Park, 565 Columbia St | May 10, 10:30 am & 1:30 pm | Tours of Chinatown’s murals with local guides | Tickets pay-what-you-can

Mother's Day Dim Sum Cooking Class | The Skript Kitchen, 1450 W 7th Ave | May 10, 11:30 am | Learn bao buns, rose dumplings & sundaes | Tickets $108

Kubota Sake: Tradition in Every Drop | Everything Wine, 998 Marine Dr | May 10, 3 pm | Guided Japanese sake tasting with an expert from Kubota | Tickets $28

Mother’s Day Market at Junction Public Market | 200 Granville Street, Vancouver | May 10 - May 11, 12 pm-5 pm | Junction’s Mother’s Day Market features chocolate tasting, painting workshops, tarot card readings and live entertainment | Free

Vancouver Best Coffee Rave | Leisure Center, 950 Homer St | May 10, 2 pm | Daytime EDM rave with unlimited coffee and live DJs | Tickets $19

Mother’s Day Cake Decorating Workshop | Lilium Bakery, 125 3rd St W | May 10, 11 am | Hands-on cake decorating for all ages | Tickets $129

Motherless Day Vancouver | KOU Studios, 2008 Manitoba St. | May 11, 11 am | An event + gathering for those without moms, sharing stories and food + drink | Tickets $65

Sophia's Forest | Studio T at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts | May 29 - June 1, 2025 | A chamber opera that explores the inner life of an immigrant girl | Tickets $55+

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

• It looks like Hastings Park at the PNE Fairgrounds is home to some very old weapons. [CBC]

• Discover Downtown Van's 2025 State of Downtown report, packed with insights on downtown Vancouver's performance. Get the full report today! [Sponsored]

• Here’s all the most recent music released from Vancouver artists. [Straight]

• This popular Taiwanese restaurant is now open on Alberni. I’ve been in Taiwan, and it’s pretty good!

• Bard on the Beach is back starting June 10, with Much Ado About Nothing, and three other shows. 

• WestJet is running a sale on Canadian destinations right now. 

• JJ Bean, the coffee shop, now has a donut shop called Neate Donuts. [Vancouver is Awesome]