Checking In On Last Year’s 10, The Toronto Star
August 13, 2007
It’s been a dynamic 12 months for alumni of the Star’s annual ‘to watch’ list
LESLIE SCRIVENER
FEATURE WRITER
Films made, books published, deals brokered, Olympic dreams in sight: 2007 was a very good year for the accomplished Torontonians the Sunday Star profiled a year ago in its “10 to watch” feature.
For some it was a year of dazzling births. In June, Janice Price ushered in the inaugural Luminato festival, an annual, 10-day celebration of the arts. Mo Johnston, manager of Toronto FC, helped set off a local explosion of soccer mania with sold-out games and devoted fans at the shiny new BMO Field at Exhibition Place.
“It was really, oh, amazing,” says Luminato CEO Price, 51, thinking back on 2007, which she calls “the fastest year of my life.” After working in New York and Philadelphia, she returned to her hometown to run the $12-million festival.
“It completely opened my eyes, that there really is an appetite for this kind of event.”
The past year also brought recognition to three of our 2007 nominees who work in the arts.
About 12 months ago, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a documentary filmmaker, was heading to Afghanistan to do a film on women five years after the U.S. invasion. This year, that film, Lifting the Veil, was broadcast in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Australia.
“In some cases, women’s lives have become a lot worse,” she said on the phone recently from Karachi, where she was preparing to cover Pakistan’s parliamentary elections for The New York Times website and PBS (before the turmoil following the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto). Though an unprecedented number of women have been elected to the Afghan parliament, they have virtually no power, she says. “They are icons for the West to see.”
Still, there are glimmers of hope. More girls are being educated, though often their fathers disapprove, she notes. “… People in the West think that Afghanistan is well on its way to recovery. One of the wake-up calls is that women who were promised rights and freedoms still do not have them.”
Obaid-Chinoy, 29, also won the Broadcast Journalist of the year award from the One World Broadcasting Trust, which promotes filmmaking about developing areas. Her next film will be on the vanishing middle class in Iraq.
Artist Shary Boyle is back in Canada after a six-month residency in London, part of the Canada Council International Studio Program, which culminated in a September exhibition at a venue called Space in the U.K. capital. The piece she created was a new development, she says, combining overhead projections of her performance work with floating sculptures. Her subject was the effect of colonization “forces that change the world.”
Boyle, 35, was also an Ontario finalist for the $50,000 Sobey Art Award for a Canadian artist under 40. “Even though I didn’t get the award, there was a lot of buzz about it,” she says. Boyle was has been working on a monograph of her work called Otherworld Uprising, to be published early in 2008.
There was also buzz last year about playwright and poet Jonathan Garfinkel’s new book and first work of literary non-fiction, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestinian Divide, which had set off a publishers’ bidding war. Ambivalence tells of his life in Toronto and his journey to Israel to search for a house where Palestinians and Israelis were believed to live together peacefully. “For me the story ends up speaking about so much more than the Middle East,” says Garfinkel, 34.
“There’s a longing for home, what it means to have a home, questions of identity and culture, and what it is we long and hope for.” He’s now working on a novel based on his experiences in the former Soviet republics.
The end of the year brought good news to one of Canada’s top wrestlers, Ohenewa Akuffo, 28 , who only two weeks ago qualified for Canada’s Olympic team. Though the Brampton native had won the championship at the Canada Cup in June, she didn’t improve her second-place standing at the Pan American Games in Brazil the following month, and failed to win a medal at the World Championships in China in September. “It was a little depressing, and I didn’t want that disappointment to carry through the rest of the year.”
Her goal is clear: the summer Olympics. “That’s all I think about. I’ve been thinking about it for four years.”
Toronto police inspector Peter Yuen, the highest-ranking Chinese Canadian police officer in Ontario, was often in the news in 2007. As the duty inspector who filled in for the chief of police after regular business hours, he was frequently called in to comment on Toronto homicides. “I was privy to many human tragedies,” he recalls. Earlier this month Yuen, 43, was reassigned to 55 Division, where he is second in command.
“A lot of people think policing is chasing cars and shootings. My style is to stress that to be a police officer in 2007 and beyond, you have to have customer service – be professional and be compassionate.”
Yuen also started a master’s degree in organizational leadership at the University of Guelph, doing course work online. His thesis may upset the police establishment, he says. “I believe Canadian police organizations should look at non-police officers for the position of chief-of-police. We’re too traditional.”
Finally, Zainab Taiyeb, whose experience selling Rogers telecommunications services door-to-door transformed her into a workers’ rights activist, was out of the country and not available for an interview. Taiyeb, 44, is chair of the board of directors of the Toronto Workers’ Action Centre. Says Deena Ladd, co-ordinator of the centre, “It’s important to have people directly affected by bad working conditions play a leadership role in our organization.”