Nova Scotia teenage filmmaker wins award for short film debut

A teenage filmmaker in Nova Scotia is celebrating after winning an award for her short film, “No Pun Intended."

Lindsay Walker’s film won best fiction film at the 2022 FIN Kids Youth Film Competition earlier this month.

The short film documents the friendship of teens Katya and Maria, who go out of their way to find puns in everyday life. The idea for “No Pun Intended” came from Walker’s father, who made a joke about being afraid of speed bumps. (Spoiler alert: He got over it.)

“Lock-picking is an underrated skill,” Maria says at one point in the film, while using a bobby pin to break into Maria’s locker. “A lot of people think it’s useless but it’s really opened a lot of doors for me.”

A recent high school graduate who served as valedictorian, Walker has been accepted to a film and video production program in Alberta. Walker, who starts film school in September, dreams of creating her own sitcom someday. In the meantime, she’s working on another short film about a girl who spends all her time alone but never feels lonely.

For Walker, 17, producing and directing a short film while finishing high school proved challenging. Despite the workload, she says she had a lot of fun working with her best friends who starred in the film.

Walker says the most difficult part of making “No Pun Intended” was working with a dog who wasn’t trained to act.

“She’s such a good dog that she wouldn’t chase the bike that we wanted her to chase. She just wanted to sit there,” Walker explained, noting that she spent more than an hour trying to get Lacy to cooperate with the production.”

The best part? Winning.

The FIN Kids Youth Film Competition was free to enter for Atlantic Canadians aged 18 and under with a maximum runtime of five minutes. FIN announced its winners on June 13.