Filmmaker and screenwriter Ken Kabatoff (Travelers) took home the big prize at the DGC BC’s Greenlight competition a couple of years ago, and the short film he created with that financial backing – The Doukhobor – is one of the most impactful horror films our host has ever seen. The Doukhobor draws its inspiration from the story of the Freedomite Doukhobors, and the abysmal treatment this group of pacifists, freethinkers, and anti-materialists (whose members included Ken’s own family) received at the hands of the Canadian government. Ken is also the filmmaker of two terrifying horror shorts – LUTO and LUTO 2 – as well as a recent video in which he attempted to remake his first LUTO film shot for shot using AI (a video that is horrifying for reasons not related to it being a remake of a horror film).
In this riveting conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Ken talks about making horror films for audiences who live in horrifying times, the bravery of Freedomite Doukhobors (and how their history impacted his short film), and what his recent experiment taught him about AI.
Episode sponsor: Fish Flight Entertainment
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Filmmaker and screenwriter Ken Kabatoff (Travelers) took home the big prize at the DGC BC’s Greenlight competition a couple of years ago, and the short film he created with that financial backing – The Doukhobor – is one of the most impactful horror films our host has ever seen. The Doukhobor draws its inspiration from the story of the Freedomite Doukhobors, and the abysmal treatment this group of pacifists, freethinkers, and anti-materialists (whose members included Ken’s own family) received at the hands of the Canadian government. Ken is also the filmmaker of two terrifying horror shorts – LUTO and LUTO 2 – as well as a recent video in which he attempted to remake his first LUTO film shot for shot using AI (a video that is horrifying for reasons not related to it being a remake of a horror film).
In this riveting conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Ken talks about making horror films for audiences who live in horrifying times, the bravery of Freedomite Doukhobors (and how their history impacted his short film), and what his recent experiment taught him about AI.
Episode sponsor: Fish Flight Entertainment
The wildly talented multi-hyphenate Mayumi Yoshida returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to discuss her long-awaited feature film directorial debut, Akashi, which is inspired by Mayumi’s own experience of living in the space between cultures. Ten years after moving to Vancouver, struggling visual artist Kana (that’s Mayumi) returns to Tokyo to attend the funeral of her beloved grandmother. Arriving in Japan, she rekindles a tentative flame with her bashful ex-boyfriend, Hiro, an aspiring thespian who vanished from her life a decade prior. As Kana digs deeper into her grandmother’s past, she uncovers a family secret that prompts her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about love, duty, and belonging.
Akashi – which Mayumi wrote, directed, and starred in – has its world premiere this week at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival. The feature began its life as a Fringe Festival play in 2016, before evolving into a Storyhive-funded short film in 2017 (the latter for which she earned a slew of awards, including the award for Best Female Director at the 2018 Vancouver Short Film Festival, and the Outstanding Writer Award at the NBCUniversal Short Film Festival). Although it’s been a long road to bring Akashi to the screen in its current feature-length incarnation, Mayumi hasn’t been idle in the intervening years: between directing short films – including the music video for Different Than Before, which won the SXSW Music Video Jury Award in 2023 – and working as a dialect coach and cultural consultant and advocating for diversity and inclusion in our challenging industry, Mayumi has been fighting to get this film made. This included, in 2021, taking on Telefilm, Canada’s major funding provider, for their outdated language requirements that didn’t take Canada’s purported commitment to diversity and inclusion into consideration. In this riveting conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Mayumi reflects on her journey to this moment, how Akashi changed over the years, and how Akashi changed her as an artist.
Episode sponsor: UBCP / ACTRA
The YVR Screen Scene Podcast
Filmmaker and screenwriter Ken Kabatoff (Travelers) took home the big prize at the DGC BC’s Greenlight competition a couple of years ago, and the short film he created with that financial backing – The Doukhobor – is one of the most impactful horror films our host has ever seen. The Doukhobor draws its inspiration from the story of the Freedomite Doukhobors, and the abysmal treatment this group of pacifists, freethinkers, and anti-materialists (whose members included Ken’s own family) received at the hands of the Canadian government. Ken is also the filmmaker of two terrifying horror shorts – LUTO and LUTO 2 – as well as a recent video in which he attempted to remake his first LUTO film shot for shot using AI (a video that is horrifying for reasons not related to it being a remake of a horror film).
In this riveting conversation with Sabrina Rani Furminger, Ken talks about making horror films for audiences who live in horrifying times, the bravery of Freedomite Doukhobors (and how their history impacted his short film), and what his recent experiment taught him about AI.
Episode sponsor: Fish Flight Entertainment
