Vancouver’s transformation

It is a great privilege to live in a country and province that’s continuously changing and evolving – for the better. Vancouver in particular is transforming itself from a secular village-type city to a cosmopolitan, international province that will soon equal the international standards of New York, Paris and San Francisco.

New, upmarket, posh, innovative restaurants are opening weekly to take over venues that close because they did not fulfill the contemporary culinary needs of more discriminating clientele, locals and tourists alike. Vancouver as a city is unique because all the condominiums and the urban lifestyle have a downtown that works efficiently and has the added benefit of active social interaction for those who don’t want to be trapped in ethnicity. As can be expected, Filipino immigrants who refuse to leave their Pinoy comfort zone will feel uncomfortable in the new Vancouver.

In eating out, British Columbians spent an average of $1,724 each year in restaurants or 24.2 percent of their annual food budget. This puts British Columbia ahead of everyone else in Canada in consuming food and beverage outside the home. BC Statistics reported that as Vancouver ready itself for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the restaurant industry is looking specially good.

Other important data in the F&B business:

• B.C. restaurant industry’s annual revenue is over $6 billion

• Number of restaurants is more than 9,500

• Employees in restaurants and bars, over 118,000

• Restaurant designs have more elegance and reflect a sophistication to match a unique cuisine.

• B.C. diners have developed a taste for organic food as the diners get more educated. Thus, B.C. farms get in on the trend to organics and locally grown produce.

If you’re Vancouver bound, be sure to dine at Lift Bar Grill behind Bayshore Hotel on Coal Harbour, Saltik Steakhouse on Alberni st. and Rare on Hornby St. and Mistral French Bistro on West Broadway.

In the field of international cinema, there are now several art house theaters that show mature foreign movies (all subtitled in English). Subtitled foreign movies are not popular in America because mainstream Americans with shopping mall mentality don’t like to read. They find subtitles too distracting and too taxing for their Archie Bunker type minds. They are more appreciated in Canada.

Last week, I went to three superb foreign movies in three excellent venues. The movie-going experience took me away from moronic Hollywood movies with inane plots that don’t reflect the real world.

Here are the three films:

THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (France). This French film won eight César awards in France. "Beat" is an unusual gangster psychodrama laced with classical music. Imagine a smalltime hood who dreams of being a classical concert pianist.

The film is a compelling study of the attempt to harmonize seemingly dissonant forces – tenderness and brutality, classicism and modernity, European electro music and Bach/Haydn/Beethoven, France and Vietnam.

LIVE & BECOME (Israel). Here’s a modern epic about displaced people we don’t know much about: black Jews. It chronicles the story of a young Ethiopian boy who was airlifted to Israel, disguised as a Jew. And we follow the child to adulthood. The story deals with the topic of racism and racial purity as it applies to Judaism. "Live" was skillfully crafted to show the complexities of race and religion in a rapidly changing world.

The journey which takes the viewer to Africa, Israel, France can be taken as a parable of the immigrant experience around the world. And the young boy’s path to adulthood is full of humanity, warmth, universal emotions.

TSOTSI (South Africa). The movie title means gangster and thug and it won the Oscar for best foreign film this year. Tsotsi is set in the poverty-stricken environment of the Johannesburg ghettos. And the theme is about a man’s battle with his own brutal nature and the past that bred it. What is moving is behind the gangster’s violent exterior conceals an aching, caring, loving childlike man. There’s a positive note in the end as the characters struggle and avert a cold, uncaring world.