Shot-in-Manitoba films ready to screen, stream

This has been a big year for film and TV shot in Winnipeg, with fare such as the comedic gangster film Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice topping the streaming charts when it debuted in March on Hulu/Disney+, with more than 300 million views worldwide.

Smaller indie films, such as Johnny Ma’s The Mother and the Bear, and James McLellan and Alexandre (Sasha) Trudeau’s dramatic feature Hair of the Bear also got long-awaited screen time in the first quarter of the year, as did Rhayne Vermette’s experimental feature Levers.

After the Bob Odenkirk thriller Normal becomes available Tuesday, expect more locally shot fare to come to cinemas, or your TV screen, in the months ahead.

Latest dating trend sees people hyping attributes of friend in front of crowd

It’s being billed as the antidote to dating-app fatigue.

And while swiping is off the table there’s still a screen involved, albeit one onstage.

The recruitment drive for romance via PowerPoint slides, Date My Mate events are meet-cutes for a generation done with heavily filtered pictures and AI-polished bios.

The movement shunning online interactions for IRL connection is gaining momentum globally.

Gallery’s ‘offcut’ fundraiser reflects its reputation as space to experiment

As it approaches its five-year anniversary, the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices — an arts organization offering free access to an eclectic slate of programming — wants to stay put in the West Exchange District.

'Kimberly Akimbo' takes on mortality with heart and humour

Nearly three years ago, Debbie Maslowsky was watching the Tony Awards when Anagram cast its spell.

First performed on Broadway by Victoria Clark and Justin Cooley, the song is a duet between the characters Kimberly Levaco and Seth Weetis, two teenagers who don’t look the same but share a thoughtful friendship rooted in inclusive language.

Seth is feeling alone for his reasons, while the newcomer Kimberly’s got hers: a new town, a new school and an unnamed, rare condition expressed through sped-up aging — calling to mind Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting and Penny Marshall’s 1988 feature Big.

(Tuck closed on Broadway after 39 performances in 2015; Big the Musical was nominated for five Tonys and seven Drama Desk Awards in 1996; and in 2023, Kimberly Akimbo won five Tonys including best musical, best book and best score.)

New craft exhibition gives artists licence to lighten up

Textile artist and Manitoba Craft Council program co-ordinator Katrina Craig had a simple brief for the artists taking part in her curatorial debut, Serious Play, at C2 Centre for Craft: each person was asked to investigate the radical potential of play when making pieces for the show.

The four local interdisciplinary artists — Charlotte Sigurdson, Candace Neumann, Maureen Winnicki Lyons and Miriam Delos Santos — took her playful instructions seriously.

“Culturally, we think of play as frivolous or irrelevant. It’s a low priority,” Craig, 35, says. “But I think of play as an essential part of creating new things and of problem-solving. I’ve found that when I lean into that not-so-serious side of myself, good things tend to come about.”

The theme is especially pertinent in the field of craft, which can often be more intensely focused on rigorous skill-building and technical mastery. Sometimes playfulness can fall to the wayside in the pursuit of excellence

Heated Rivalry parody going full steam ahead in NYC

Alan Kliffer is bringing The Cottage to off-Broadway.

The New York-based, Winnipeg-born and -raised impresario is directing and producing Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody, which opens May 12 for an eight-week run at the 6th Floor Theater.

Three Winnipeg restaurants among Canada’s best

Three Winnipeg restaurants have made it into the annual Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list.

Mandel Hitzer’s Deer + Almond and Emily Butcher’s Nola, both which appeared last year, retained their spots but dropped down in placing.

Hitzer’s restaurant at 85 Princess St. held the rear of the top 50, down 16 places from last year’s 34 ranking.

Nola (300 Taché Ave.) came in at 88, after making its debut on last years’ list at 86.

Winning filmmaker Sidney Phommarath honoured for her work

After screening her latest documentary at last weekend’s FascinAsian Film Festival, Winnipeg’s Sidney Phommarath has received the Erin Hembrador Emerging Filmmaker Award.

Hembrador, who died in 2022 at 33, was a rising star in the local and national film scene, earning a pair of best-of-fest honours at FascinAsian for her short films Mansanas and Container, the latter of which was co-directed with Winnipeg’s Quan Luong.

Phommarath, a Laotian-Canadian filmmaker, is the fourth recipient of the award, presented and funded by Hembrador’s family, the Winnipeg Film Group and Frank Digital, where Hembrador worked starting in 2019.

A film graduate of the University of Winnipeg who specializes in human rights narratives, Phommarath’s latest documentary is Dear Nya, which showcases her visit to her ancestral homeland of Laos.

Nunavut-born graphic artist Ningiukulu Teevee gives traditional tales a cheeky twist

Ningiukulu Teevee is a graphic artist. But she is, first and foremost, a storyteller.

In her drawings and prints, the award-winning Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut-born and -based artist offers vividly imaginative interpretations of traditional Inuit tales that have been passed down for generations; oral stories made legible in her poignant and playful style.

She tells stories of the legendary adventurer Kiviuq and the sea goddess Sedna.

She revisits, often, the beloved legend of the Owl and the Raven, which explains how the raven came to have inky black feathers and the snowy owl came to be spotted.

Inclusive, integrated musical theatre company in Winnipeg first of its kind in Canada

With its first public performance — a revue of numbers from family favourites such as Toy Story and Frozen — a new performing arts organization in Winnipeg is aiming at a more accessible, accepting and diverse vision of musical theatre production.

Co-founded by theatre educators Brenda Gorlick, Lois Brothers and Laura Kolisnyk, AIM 4 All brings together performers with and without disabilities to train, practise and perform in full-scale musical productions: AIM stands for “all-inclusive musicals.”

This weekend, 28 Manitobans will take the stage in five stagings of Disney’s Dare to Dream Jr. at the University of Winnipeg’s Asper Centre for Theatre.

With plenty of supportive family and community members excited to see the result of months of preparation, the organizers are pleased to say each show is sold out.

Celebrate May 4 with series from Star Wars universe

May 4 is Star Wars Day and, to celebrate this unofficial holiday — and the upcoming theatrical release of The Mandalorian and Grogu later this month — we thought we’d take a little dig into other stories from the Star Wars universe beyond the core three trilogies.

Rhyme repository recognizes razed Métis enclave Rooster Town

April was National Poetry Month and despite the fact the annual celebration has come and gone for another year, the literary art form continues to enjoy an everyday presence on Dudley Avenue, near Harrow Street.

Bernie Kruchak is the founder and curator of the Rooster Town Poetry Shed, named for Rooster Town, a Métis settlement that existed close to his and his wife’s present-day home for six decades until residents’ shanties were razed by the city in the late 1950s to pave the way for the Grant Park Shopping Centre and neighbouring Grant Park High School.

The installation, which rests in the Kruchaks’ front yard at 939 Dudley Ave., resembles a little free library. Only, instead of being stocked with books, it is wholly devoted to poetry.

Kruchak, 74, erected the two-metre-tall structure in July 2025. However, its roots date back to 1963, when Kruchak, who is of Ukrainian descent, was a grade-school student in Sioux Lookout, Ont.

City’s most famous intersection the subject of next Free Press Book Club gathering

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Winnipeg authors and podcasters Sabrina Janke and Alex Judge to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, May 26 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss their book Portage & Main: How an Iconic Intersection Shaped Winnipeg’s History, Politics, and Urban Life.

Published in November 2025 by Great Plains Press, just months after Portage and Main re-opened to pedestrian crossing, the book chronicles the history of Winnipeg’s most famous intersection through the city’s history — from its humble beginnings that were home to a handful of hotels and stores to the wind-swept junction of two of the city’s biggest streets where locals come to protest, celebrate and mourn.

“(S)omething about Portage and Main pulls us to it. It’s where we go to shout: in joy, in anger, in despair,” they write.

In her review of Portage & Main for the Free Press, Mary Horodyski added “crowds assembled at times as though drawn to the city’s beating heart. Whether shoulder-to-shoulder in celebration of hockey, hand-in-hand for a round dance or gathered together in mourning for the loss of Indigenous women and girls.”

Winnipeg-raised pro wrestler Chris Jericho gets call to appear in series with Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman

Not every pro wrestler can say they’ve shared the ring with Nick Offerman and Nicole Kidman, but Chris Jericho can.

The Winnipeg-raised heavyweight, 55, plays himself in Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a new Apple TV+ comedy-drama from David E. Kelley (Boston Legal), based on the 2024 novel of the same name by American author Rufi Thorpe.

Elle Fanning plays Margo who, as the daughter of an ex-pro wrestler (Offerman) and a Hooters waitress (Michelle Pfeiffer), has always had to be scrappy.

So when Margo gets pregnant after an affair with her college prof, has to drop out of college and finds herself unemployed at 20 with an infant and no job, she readily accepts her estranged dad Jinx’s request to move in in exchange for childcare.

RMTC's Rubaboo: A Métis Cabaret is a musical mélange of jazz, folk, roots

You’ve probably had sirop d’érable and pemmican, but have you tried rubaboo?

A scoop of peas or corn, a dash of flour and onions, bison meat if you have it, a maple syrup garnish — and suddenly you’re cooking with bear grease (which you shouldn’t forget to add, either).

In a pinch, you might substitute grouse for bison meat, and throw in some extra turnip and parsnip plus wild vegetables to thicken your rubaboo stew.

Cooking and fusion metaphors are never far from how we talk about cultural blending, but in Canada, we’ve tended to resist America’s more assimilationist image of the melting pot. Instead, we talk of mosaics, or sometimes salad bowls, to emphasize eclecticism.