I Am A Channel is now streaming on Tubi.
The Content Creators
Brian Wiebe
Brian Wiebe is an independent filmmaker and works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor in addition to working as a film and video instructor. Brian’s work often focuses on issues of identity and mental health in the age of the internet.
The son of a fine artist and an architect, Brian’s love of art and storytelling was present from an early age, and a love of cinema a natural result. Researching the great filmmakers, working at a video store to obtain unlimited free rentals, writing scripts and crafting camcorder epics followed and ultimately lead to a fairly logical conclusion: film school.
Brian was accepted to Ohio University’s Honor’s Tutorial College of Film. This unique program allowed Brian to participate in a graduate program as additional tutorial coursework in which topics chosen by students could be explored with a professor in a one on one settings. At Ohio University, Brian met lifelong mentors and learned the craft of filmmaking while also exploring the art of storytelling and finding the themes that would define his later work. Several of Brian’s undergraduate short films screened at festivals both nationally and internationally and won some awards.
After some time working in the corporate and commercial video world, Brian decided to pursue his MFA at Columbia College Chicago. In his time at Columbia, Brian made several award-winning short films and forged many creative partnerships with industry professionals. Immediately upon graduation, Brian wrote, directed and produced his first feature film, A Good Person. The film served as the first creative collaboration between Brian and Christine Vrem-Ydstie. The two would go on to collaborate on several projects including I Am a Channel.
Brian continues to work in Chicago as a film and video professional - directing and shooting commercials, educational and corporate documentaries, branded content and music videos.
Christine Vrem-Ydstie
Christine Vrem-Ydstie is a Los Angeles-based actor, writer, and producer. She spent a decade in the Chicago, becoming deeply entrenched in the Chicago’s DIY film and theatre community, working alongside Academy-award nominated actors Richard Jenkins and Gabourey Sidibe in locally-produced independent films, on-stage with guerrilla and storefront theatre troupes and behind the camera on homegrown, artist-driven film projects. She’s also worked at Steppenwolf Theatre, guest starred on each of NBC’s One Chicago shows, on Fox’s Empire and neXt and in local and national advertising and print campaigns. Her face currently graces a billboard across the street from Wrigley Field in Chicago.
Before she started acting and making movies, Christine was a poet. She started writing poems in a HelloKitty journal in kindergarten and went on to major in poetry writing at Barnard College, studying under Guggenheim Fellows Saskia Hamilton and Claudia Rankine. The things that inspired her poetry are the same things that inspire her as a performer and filmmaker—small but telling moments between people, bits of idiosyncratic language, the unintentionally funny and sad and, like many artists before her, the surprising difficulty of just being alive.
Christine is passionate about creating projects with friends that explore the aspects of our culture that feel upside down and sideways. I Am A Channel is the latest in a long series of collaborations between Christine and Brian Wiebe and she recently produced and acted in Fresh Hell, a movie written, produced and directed by her husband and fellow actor, Ryan Imhoff. She’s a proud member of SAG-AFTRA .