Sweet16 For celluloid champion, nothing beats spooling up vintage film format to ‘purr’ on a projector By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 11, 2026

Behold the power of the press.

In 2013, the Killarney Guide published an article about Elyas Tesfaye, a professional agriculturist who had moved to the Killarney-Turtle Mountain region for his job.

The story centred around Tesfaye’s volunteer duties at a local seniors’ complex.

Specifically, how he commonly entertained residents by screening decades-old documentaries from his personal collection of 16-millimetre films, a movie-playback format he became enamoured with while growing up in his native Ethiopia.

Tesfaye didn’t have too many titles to choose from — 30, tops — but that changed dramatically after the piece appeared in the Guide, which has served the Killarney area since 1894.

That week, the paper’s editor heard from a Crystal City couple who had “some” 16mm films they thought Tesfaye might be interested in.

Tesfaye, who now lives in Transcona with his wife Iris and their two young children, got back to them immediately, only to discover that what they’d referred to as some films was closer to 600, all of which he was only too happy to take off their hands.

Digitized versions of many of those films — along with scores of others — are presently available for viewing on Canada 150 Archive, a YouTube channel Tesfaye launched in 2015, as a way to share his treasures with the rest of the world.

Content on the channel, which to date has received more than two million views, runs the gamut — from 30-second television commercials to National Film Board of Canada documentaries to trailers for Hollywood blockbusters such as Dog Day Afternoon and French Connection II.

(If jazz music is your jam, be sure to check out a grainy black-and-white clip from the 1950s of Louis Prima, a.k.a. the King of Swing, belting out That Old Black Magic.)

“I fully admit that I’m not very discriminating when it comes to subject matter,” Tesfaye says, explaining that 16mm — a film gauge first introduced in 1923 that continues to be employed today — refers to the width of the film itself. “Basically, if it’s available on 16mm (film), I want it.”

Tesfaye, 44, was born and raised in Addis Ababa. A movie nut for as long as he can remember, he specifically recalls watching a VHS tape at age 14 with his father, and pressing “pause” on their VCR to inquire about a mysterious-looking contraption one of the characters was operating. Why, that’s a film projector, his dad let him know — a response that led to more questions.

How does it work? Where does the picture come from? Could he get one, too?

Soon thereafter, his father bought him his first projector, an Italian model manufactured by a company called Tondo. The unit came with a full set of instructions and before you could say “lights, camera, action,” Tesfaye, the third youngest of four siblings, had converted his bedroom into a makeshift cinema.

There, he would hole up for hours on end, watching second-hand films he lucked into — mainly five-minute excerpts from animated Disney features (here he breaks into his rendition of I Wan’na Be Like You from 1967’s The Jungle Book) — on a blank wall-as-screen.

“I fully admit that I’m not very discriminating when it comes to subject matter.”

“I loved that it had reels, and how it purred when it was in operation. I liked machinery in general plus I adored movies so for me it was a perfect marriage,” he says.

That being said, Tesfaye, who is fully fluent in Amharic, English and French, parked his hobby while studying animal science at Haramaya University in eastern Ethiopia.

He didn’t pay the subject any mind, either, during the three years he spent at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga., where he completed his master’s degree.

No, it wasn’t until January 2011, when he moved to Winnipeg to fill an assistant-professor position at the University of Manitoba, that his thoughts began to drift back to his teenage pastime.

“I must have mentioned it to my colleagues because one afternoon I returned to my desk after lunch only to see a reel marked The Magic of Milk staring me in the face,” he says.

“I asked a co-worker where it came from and they said a professor — Loreen Onischuk — dropped it off. I bought a used projector in order to watch it — it turned out to be a beautiful, 20-minute colour documentary produced by Manitoba’s dairy industry — and thanks to it, I ventured down the rabbit hole, all over again.”

In 2014, shortly after he moved back to Winnipeg from Killarney, Tesfaye contacted the late Dave Barber, the long-time programmer at Cinematheque, to pick his brain about the history of 16mm film. (Following Barber’s death in 2021, the Exchange District movie house was renamed Dave Barber Cinematheque, in his honour.)

The two became fast friends. Pretty soon, Barber was dropping by Tesfaye’s abode to take in whatever latest treasures his pal had secured, either from online auction sites such as eBay or from private parties in and around the city.

At one point, Barber even invited Tesfaye to screen some of his favourites at Cinematheque, as part of a Winnipeg Film Group event.

Thanks to others he was communicating with on a Facebook page dedicated to 16mm film, Tesfaye taught himself how to digitize his collection, primarily as a means of preservation.

That led directly to his YouTube channel, originally dubbed 16mm Maestro. Tesfaye changed its name two years later to Canada 150 Archive for a pair of reasons: firstly, to honour the country’s sesquicentennial anniversary and secondly, because almost 80 per cent of his ever-growing film stash was Canadian in nature.

Tesfaye, a business-development manager for Agribution Canada, owns four projectors, plus two he strips for parts as needed. All six are kept in a cramped space in his basement, an area that also houses hundreds of film canisters and reels filed indiscriminately on shelves.

Not much has changed since he was a kid in Africa, he reports.

He continues to scrutinize fresh finds by projecting images onto a bare wall, generally after his wife and children have turned in for the night.

Iris fully supports his enthusiasm, but when it comes to pulling up a chair and joining him to watch documentaries about, say, the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway or the 1950 flood that paralyzed Winnipeg, she “couldn’t really care less,” he says with a chuckle.

“On the other hand, our seven-year-old seems to get a big kick out of Abbott and Costello and Donald Duck, which has been great to see.”

Tesfaye also has fans at the Park Manor Care Home on Redonda Street, where, as he did in Killarney, he showcases films on a near-monthly basis.

There have even been occasions when viewers have spotted themselves or somebody they know on screen. “Hey, that’s my grandma,” a person shouted out during Octopus Hunt, a 1965 NFB documentary about deep-sea diving.

As for holy grails, Tesfaye would love to secure 16mm versions of films he’s appeared in. He has served as an extra on a dozen projects shot in Winnipeg, and seven years ago, he even got to meet one of his idols.

He was reaching for a last piece of cake during a lunch break on the set of Flag Day, when he noticed a hand going for the same slice.

He looked up, only to recognize Academy Award-winner Sean Penn, the film’s director. He meant to compliment Penn on his tremendous body of work but, as nervous as he was, all he managed to blurt out was something along the lines of, “That’s OK, you can have it.”

winnipegfreepress.com/davidsanderson

 

TOP TEN

The 10 most-watched 16mm films on Elyas Tesfaye’s YouTube channel, Canada 150 Archive.

1. FBX (Five Basic Exercises) — Royal Canadian Air Force training film, 1959

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2. Speed King Killed in Race Crash — 60-second newsreel about the tragic death of driver George Robson during an auto race in Atlanta in 1946

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3. Organist Ethel Smith performing The Breeze and I — excerpt from the 1946 movie Cuban Pete starring Desi Arnaz

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4. Haiti — National Film Board of Canada documentary, 1952

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5. Fisheries of the Great Slave Lake — NFB documentary, 1956

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6. Railroaders — 1958 documentary about winter rail workers in the western Canadian Rockies

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7. International Harvesters promotional video about its 1979 line of S-Series vehicles

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8. Terra Nova, the History of Newfoundland — NFB documentary, 1963

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9. Oxford Films’ “sports-action profile” on American skier Vladimir (Spider) Sabich, who died by gunshot in 1976

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10. John A. MacDonald: The Impossible Idea — NFB documentary, 1961