Portrait

  • Métis, Métis Not

    Métis, Métis Not is a video documentation of the artist’s lack of relationship with her cultural background. It explores her own myths, stereotypes, and clichés from reenacting the discovery of her native heritage to embracing her Métis-ness late in life, transforming into a Gift Shop Native Doll. The piece deals with feelings of guilt, lack of entitlement, and own naiveté at her personal cultural crossroads and what it means to be Métis.

    Biography

    Arlea Ashcroft is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist involved in the media, performing, and visual arts. She has received local, national and international exposure through publication, broadcast and public presentation. Whether as guitarist for the punk band SHRIMP, challenging the usual dynamic of western art through portraiture, or carefully exposing an image, Ashcroft’s work is deliberately off-putting and antagonistic.
  • Negativipeg

    Negativipeg tells the story of Rory Lepine, who shot to Herostratic fame in 1985 when he attacked Winnipeg rock legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a North End 7-Eleven. Narrated by Lepine himself, the film meditates on this mysterious act of destruction and suggests that Winnipeg might have an attitude problem. 

    Biography

    Matthew Rankin was born in Winnipeg and educated in Montréal and Québec City. A graduate of l’Université Laval and l’Institut national de l’image et du son, Rankin returned to Winnipeg in 2005 to work more directly with the imagery of his native province. His films include Oú est Maurice? (2006), which won the CanWest Global Prize for best short film, and, with Mike Maryniuk, the underground collage opera Death by Popcorn (2005) which was temporarily banned in his native Manitoba. An alumnus of the Toronto International Film Festival's Talent Lab in 2007, Rankin completed his experimental drama, Hydro-Lévesque, in 2008 and Negativipeg in 2010.
  • Open Window

    A backyard birthday party is consumed with tension when an abusive relationship between the birthday boy’s parents is revealed.

    Biography

    Born in Calgary, Alberta, Cam Woykin graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge in 2003. He has since completed numerous short films, screening his work throughout Canada and internationally. Woykin currently resides in Toronto, where he is completing his Master’s of Fine Arts in film production at York University.
  • Hirsch

    Objects found by children in an attic tell the story of the father of Canadian theatre, John Hirsch. A ten year-old boy watching his friends and babysitter play video games and unearth Hirsch’s belongings listens to Hirsch’s deathbed interview on an old reel-to-reel player.

    As a teenaged World War II orphan, Hirsch came to Winnipeg from Europe, his only possession a suitcase puppet show. He became an agitator for culture on the Canadian prairies, co-founding the Manitoba Theatre Centre and going to direct on New York's Lincoln Center stage. He died in Toronto in 1989 at age 59 from complications due to AIDS.
  • Life From 95

    Created through the WITH ART program at the Winnipeg Ars Council Life From 95 is a poignant look at how music can provide hope to high risk refugee youth in the inner city.

    About the Film

    The WITH ART program matches artists with community groups to collaborate on art projects that explore ideas and issues and give voice to community. The resulting voices were literal, loud, clear and strong. The filmmakers worked with the youth of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba to create a hip hop video and a documentary of the process.

    IRCOM, located at 95 Ellen Street in downtown Winnipeg, is a transitional housing complex and delivers social and recreation programs to newly arrived refugees and immigrants to Canada. Over 250 new immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Liberia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan live at IRCOM and access their  programs – over half of whom are under the age of 18. Navigating their new environment is challenging and some youth become vulnerable to gang-related activities. The goal was to offer opportunities for more productive activities and creative growth.

    Watch the Live From 95 Music Video

  • Life From 95

    Created through the WITH ART program at the Winnipeg Ars Council Life From 95 is a poignant look at how music can provide hope to high risk refugee youth in the inner city.

    About the Film

    The WITH ART program matches artists with community groups to collaborate on art projects that explore ideas and issues and give voice to community. The resulting voices were literal, loud, clear and strong. The filmmakers worked with the youth of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba to create a hip hop video and a documentary of the process.

    IRCOM, located at 95 Ellen Street in downtown Winnipeg, is a transitional housing complex and delivers social and recreation programs to newly arrived refugees and immigrants to Canada. Over 250 new immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Liberia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan live at IRCOM and access their  programs – over half of whom are under the age of 18. Navigating their new environment is challenging and some youth become vulnerable to gang-related activities. The goal was to offer opportunities for more productive activities and creative growth.

    Watch the Live From 95 Music Video

  • Sharhé Halé Shakhsi
    A Persian language autobiography of Iranian filmmaker, Matthew Rankin. Says Rankin, “This is the only honest film I have ever made.”
  • Time Away
    Three guides accompany us on a road trip away from time... and towards the transformative end of the road, space...
  • Home Body
    A dream about falling through ice inspires a woman`s search for home, only to find it in her own body.
  • Cowards Bend the Knee
    Jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliff-hanger, Guy Maddin's tremendous Cowards Bend the Knee is a Feuillade serial ultra-condensed and blenderised, as ghostwritten by Euripides. If fiction is sometimes barely disguised autobiography, Cowards is its mirror image, twisted and poisoned wish-fulfillment: the mythomaniacal Maddin casts 'himself' (actually, Darcy Fehr) as a hockey sniper made lily-livered by mother and daughter femme fatales, and resurrects his father as the team's radio broadcaster and his own romantic antagonist. Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic lined with two-way mirrors, the plot drips with the Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul.

    Veering into penny dreadful territory with the introduction of a vengeful ghost and uncontrollable extremities as windows into the unconscious, Maddin evokes the expressionist classic The Hands of Orlac, and channels the editing style of Austrian avant-gardist Martin Arnold; Maddin fixates on his character's groping and fisting expressionist paws, bathing them in ethereal light and chopping them into dazzling, iris-heavy micro-montages. Room to pant is provided by slo-mo replays, alternately poignant and explosive: lurid, frenzied moments of impulsive violence and carnivorous sexuality lend this bewitchingly onanistic work the sublime naughtiness of an antique hand-cranked skin flick. It all takes place, after all, within a drop of sperm. Originally presented as an installation in ten peepholes at Toronto's Power Plant gallery and the 2003 Rotterdam Film Festival (where it won a special mention from the FIPRESCI jury), and now receiving its Canadian theatrical debut, Cowards demands serious consideration as a major work of art by Canada's most self-deluded cinephile.