Elvira produced the feature film SAMUEL LOUNT and over 50 video and film documentaries.

FEATURE FILM
DOCUMENTARIES
EDUCATION & INTERESTS
POLITICS
JUNG 
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Elvira Lount produced the $2 million 35 mm dramatic feature film SAMUEL LOUNT, the story of her great-great-grand uncle, a blacksmith and surveyor, who migrated from the United States to Canada in 1811 and became a leader of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837.  Unlike the American, the Canadian Revolution failed, and this pacifist who had embraced revolution was hanged for treason. 

SAMUEL LOUNT was produced in association with the CBC. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and the Seattle Film Festival. It received five Genie nominations (Canadian Academy Awards) and has been sold worldwide.

Elvira has produced over 50 video and film documentaries including: the award winning one hour film BABY CLOCK; the half hour video BELLY DANCING: IMAGES FROM VANCOUVER; the short film QUIET BEACH; forty-four videos for the Vancouver People's Law School on a variety of legal and social issues; and a video production UPROOTED, about the Japanese Internment in BC during the 2nd World War. She began her career in 1974, producing programs for Vancouver Co-op Radio.

Elvira was born in Toronto in 1952, the second oldest of eight children.  Her mother, Elizabeth Demszky is Hungarian and escaped to Canada after WW2. Murray, her Canadian born, French and British raised and educated, Civil Engineer father traces his roots back to England. Two of his ancestors arrived in America on the Mayflower in 1620.

Elvira grew up in Etobicoke and then moved to Forest Hill as a teenager. Surprisingly, she shows no ill effects from her years at St. Joseph's College, an all girls high school run by nuns.  Her extracurricular activities included summer camp, swimming, judo, gymnastics, ballet, choir, piano, volunteering in a local hospital, politics and boys. She obtained her Grade 8 Piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. In Grade 13 she won the History Prize and graduated with an Ontario Scholarship.

Catholic school days 1969

After a year at the University of Toronto trying to figure out what to do with her life, she hitchhiked to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1971 where she met a charming English immigrant, Graham Allen, who she lived with for the next 11 years. After hitchhiking around Europe in the summer of 72 on $5 a day, they took up residence in Reading, England in 1972/73 where she enjoyed the life of still "swingin' 60s" London and gained valuable experience as a  waitress in a pseudo posh British restaurant nightclub that specialized in bad British comics. 

This experience led her to complete her BA in English, History and Philosophy from the University of London, England in 1976, and to an appreciation of the British sense of humour. 

Elvira has a background in all aspects of the media. She graduated from the Media Resources Program at Capilano College, North Vancouver in 1975 where she studied film, video, photography, graphics, communications  and educational theory. She also took a course in Broadcast Journalism at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in '76.

From 1975 to 1982, Elvira taught belly dancing and danced professionally.  Elvira and Laurence met in Vancouver and have been together since 1982.

Since 1987 Elvira has been studying Jungian psychology, mythology, metaphysics and esoteric subjects. She enjoys the Tarot and I Ching  and is currently trying to defy the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics by running, swimming, yoga and working out, eating well and taking a lot of herbs and vitamins.

"The unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to it's remotest beginnings. Not, indeed a bad deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual's life in invisible ways - all the more effective because invisible. It is not just a gigantic, historical prejudice, so to speak, an a priori historical condition; it is also the source of the instinct, for the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts presume.

From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse."

Carl Jung, The Structure of the Psyche

 

"Every advance in culture is psychologically an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through individuation. Therefore, an advance always begins with individuation: that is to say, with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through untrodden territory." 

Carl Jung, On Psychic Energy

Politics runs on both sides of Elvira's family. Her  cousin, on her mother's side, is the popular former dissident and current 5th term Mayor of Budapest - Demszky Gabor. 

Elvira became politically active at the age of 16 when she campaigned for Pierre Elliot Trudeau to become Prime Minister of Canada in 1968. In the 70s she belonged to the British Columbia New Democratic Party.

Elvira was media co-ordinator for Vancouver Mayor Mike Harcourt's come from behind election victory in 1980 and briefly assisted with Harcourt's successful candidacy for Premier of British Columbia in Oct 1991.

Elvira spent much of 1992 as a volunteer on former California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown's US Presidential Campaign. Elvira was part of the "Media Watch" team. 

Both Elvira and Laurence attended the Democratic National Convention in New York in July 1992 as the "Jerry Brown Video Crew" contributing to a television documentary about Jerry, broadcast nationally in the US. The former two time governor of California, served as Mayor of Oakland, California from 1998 to 2006. In 2006 he was elected Attorney General of California.

 
"The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers."

Carl Jung
The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

 "Whatever we fight about in the outside world is also a battle in our inner selves... Anyone who admits this will first seek the solution in himself, and this is the way all the great solutions begin." 

Carl Jung

 "Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. Then there is little sense and little nonsense either."

Carl Jung, 
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.