Labour pains

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This article was published 15/05/2021 (1886 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today marks the 102nd anniversary of when telephone operators, almost entirely women, walked away from their switchboards and rang up the beginning of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919.

More than a century later, Stand!, the movie-musical representation of the 41-day labour dispute and its violent repercussions, will commemorate the historic moment by giving Canadians an opportunity to view the film at home via digital video on demand.

Stand! — which was shot locally and stars Winnipeg-born Marshall Williams (Glee), Laura Slade Wiggins (Shameless) and Gregg Henry (Guardians of the Galaxy) — was released for digital video on-demand in the United States on May 1 in conjunction with International Workers’ Day. The movie’s distributors in Canada, Toronto-based Vortex Media, decided the digital release north of the border should coincide with anniversary of the film’s reason for being.

That means on Tuesday, Canadian viewers will get their chance to see the story of young immigrants Stefan Sokolowski (Williams) and Rebecca Almazoff (Wiggins) and the strike that roiled around them that led to 30,000 people walking off the job and a violent climax on Bloody Saturday, June 21, 1919.

“It’s going to live its biggest life nearest the anniversary of the general strike, which is kind of sweet,” says Danny Schur, a producer of Stand!, who, along with fellow Winnipegger Rick Chafe, also wrote the script.

Rob Harrison, Vortex Media’s executive vice-president, has close relatives in Winnipeg, Schur says, and Harrison suggested the later release date for Stand! would be fitting.

“He said we should put it in Canada closer to (the anniversary) because it is the Winnipeg General Strike. Let’s denote that with its release date. I thought that was just so appropriate,” Schur says.

Schur, who is a writer and composer, spent years researching the general strike’s history, as well as the union members and business owners on both sides of the dispute. He led walking and bike tours to strike sites that remain in the Exchange District and the city’s downtown.

But his main goal was a stage production about the event, and that led to the creation of Strike! The Musical, which debuted at Rainbow Stage in 2005.

Stand! was adapted from the stage production and was released in Canada in Nov. 29, 2019. Plans for a wide distribution in the U.S. in the spring of 2020 were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to cinema closures across North America for much of 2020.

“This sort-of tale of COVID woe is that this should have been happening at least a year ago,” Schur says.

“We thought May Day 2020 it would come out in theatres in the United States… Well, then came COVID, and then we said, ‘Labour Day, that’ll be perfect, COVID will be gone!’ And then we got close to Labour Day and theatres were closing and closing.”

Eventually, a deal that would have got Stand! into about 1,200 theatres across the U.S. on May 1, 2020, became a release to just 47 theatres on Dec. 1.

Co-ordinating the film’s digital release has been almost as much of a headache, as the pandemic has prevented face-to-face meetings with digital platforms that offer the film for rent or purchase.

“It takes a long time to get a movie ready to go to digital because it’s Apple, Google, Amazon, Fandango, all the individual cable broadcasters, so in Canada that’s Bell, Telus and Shaw. The technical aspects, the graphics, it’s a lot of work,” Schur says.

“This feels like the really big commercial release. This release represents the ability for the most people to see it ever, and in a super-convenient way.”

For those hoping to see Stand! on a streaming service such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, Schur says they’ll have to wait.

“Netflix is subscription streaming. That’s the last window, after this,” he says.

DVDs of Stand! will eventually be sent to schools in Canada and the United States by labour unions across North America. Schur and Stand! associate producer Cal Harrison made a pitch in the middle of an Ottawa blizzard in 2017 to Hassan Yussuf, the Canadian Labour Congress president, and his contacts within the labour movement built interest in the film project and its potential educational aspects.

 

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall