There’s a telling moment in David Spaner’s book on the history of Vancouver filmmaking when West Coast writer and director Bruce Sweeney arrives at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival’s opening-night gala with his award-winning film, Last Wedding, only to be snubbed by Toronto filmmaker Atom Egoyan. The fact that Egoyan originally hails from B.C. (or that Sweeney is from Ontario) is not lost on Spaner.

Of more interest is that “accounts of the incident circulated” back in Vancouver, stirring up gossip that, once again, apparently strained relationships between the two prominent film communities. And so it goes. But Spaner wants to set the record straight that, beyond this hostility between the two cities, Vancouver’s filmmakers stand on their own without any comparisons to anyone anywhere, except maybe those in Hollywood.

Dreaming in the Rain spans too much of the 20th century in too little space to really make this point. Not until reflections from contemporary Vancouver actors like Molly Parker or radical 1960s filmmaker Larry Kent does the film community’s story become engaging. The candid, almost breezy interviews throughout these later chapters eclipse the book’s earlier sections, which, though well researched, read like a dry list of events.

The film stories these more contemporary artists tell are often remarkable. The director responsible for encouraging many in the West Coast wave of the 1980s, John Pozer, somehow secured all of UBC’s film equipment under suspicious circumstances, rounded up his fellow students, and headed north one summer to shoot his first feature, The Grocer’s Wife. Alongside these gutsy tales of filmmaking Spaner recognizes the important economic role of American movies shooting in Vancouver – a necessary and dull evil as locals struggle for the city’s cultural autonomy.

In the end, the stouthearted individualism of these Vancouver film artists knows no bounds. But making a film anywhere in Canada is equally heroic. Dreaming in the Rain demonstrates this, but ultimately fails to clarify what is unique about the Vancouver scene besides the rain.