Get on the beach, stay out of the water

Da-na, da-na, da-na…

Even aside from the long-awaited return of Jaws to the shores of Lake Winnipeg for the annual sunset screening series (July 24, 9:30 p.m.), the 2026 lineup for the Gimli International Film Festival is scary good.

For the 26th edition of GIFF — July 22-26 — programmers scoured the seven seas to create a jam-packed schedule of global shorts, fictional features and documentaries.

Under the creative directorship of Teya Zuzek, the fest is sticking to what it knows best: a compelling mix of new and established international fare and Canadiana, featuring films that have won top honours at fests such as Hot Docs, Berlin, Cannes, Sundance and Locarno.

A note for the thirsty: this year, GIFF will host a beverage garden with products from Interlake Brewing Co., Dead Horse Cider, Brat Cat Mead and Patent 5 Distillery, along with a non-alcoholic patio stocked by Winnipeg’s Sobr Market.

Here are a few viewing guides to the festival’s program, launched Wednesday and available in full at gimlifilm.com.

The Living Dead gets new life

Ahead of the July 26 sunset screening of George A. Romero’s groundbreaking horror classic Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, be sure to get some much-needed context of the zombie genre from the 2026 doc Black Zombie.

The feature-length doc by Toronto’s Maya Annik Bedward delves into the ethnographic roots of the living dead, tracing the Hollywood story back to consider the zombie’s origins as a symbol of island spirituality and Haitian resistance.

Producers for the film include Slash of Guns N’ Roses and Jennifer Holness, who co-created the historical anthology series BLK: An Origin Story. Black Zombie plays July 24 and July 26.

Linking golf to power and privilege

In Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana, a 17-year-old girl gets hired as a “tee girl” at an elite country club outside Manila. But under the club’s pristine, almost-robotic facade of pageantry, Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto) finds some dirt she can’t simply wash away.

The winner of the Silver Bear jury prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, plus a special jury award at Sundance, this slippery tale of elitist coverups was executive produced by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Ash Is Purest White) and features dialogue in English, Mandarin, Tagalog and Ilokano. Filipiñana screens July 23 and July 25.

Healthy doses of drama

Fans of pulse-pounding hits such as ER and The Pitt should scrub in for GIFF’s prescription of medical stories, which take audiences to the front lines of the health-care world.

Switzerland-set Late Shift follows the dedicated surgery nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch), who works to keep her patients in the clear during an understaffed overnight gig where every second lost is life-altering (July 23 and 24).

From Canadian documentarian Nance Ackerman, The Delivery Line examines the growing global roles of midwives, whether in urban hospitals, medical deserts or in war zones (July 23 and 24).

From the front lines of Gaza, American Doctor — the 2026 winner of the audience choice award at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival — checks in with Palestinian, Jewish and Zoroastrian doctors responding in real time to humanitarian crises, grief and instability in the embattled territory (July 23 and 26).

Join the band

You never know who will discover your music when it gets posted to the internet. Just ask X-Cetra, a quartet of friends from California who burned 20 copies of their debut album Summer 2000 as preteens on the other side of Y2K.

The band was “ready to become the next Spice Girls,” Janet Washburn told The Guardian in 2025. That fame was elusive — but not impossible.

About 20 years later, the American label Numero was on board to release vinyl of the millennial time capsule into the Brat era. Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story is about being both in time and ahead of it. (July 24 and 26).

After collaborating on the upcoming feature MEAT — co-written by bandmates Sean Henderson and Ryan Steel — Winnipeg art-rock outfit Fencing will take the stage on July 24 for GIFF’s official afterparty.

Living Hour’s Brett Ticzon — a member of the MEAT crew — will also be spinning as Mr. Brett at the Gimli Dance Pavilion.

New shorts for the summer

Summer is for shorts, GIFF says, and this year’s festival features fresh and rediscovered outputs by some of the province’s brightest creative minds.

Among the program of 10 new shorts, which screens July 26 at 4 p.m., is Father Alphonse and the Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Artist Diana Thorneycroft sets her latest stop-motion tale on Mardi Gras, with a novice priest racing from his apartment to his church during the final hour of celebrations.

Ryan Hill’s animated short Computer-Assisted Simulation Technology for Optimizing Rivers is about Manitoba’s original timber architects — the humble beaver — and how their structural integrity transforms waterways for the better.

From Thompson’s Anna Holmen comes the 16-mm silent film Magic Tricks, which sees a stuffed animal brought to life by a magician; Holmen’s previous film, The Birds Live Here, won top Canadian honours at last year’s University of Winnipeg Film Festival.

In a different kind of creature horror, a queer alien crashes to earth and stumbles across the television, where she’s exposed to a shockingly true Canadian story of government sexuality testing in The Fruit Machine: A Space Opera by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.

On July 23, the Winnipeg Film Group presents a retrospective of 13 shorts from its 50-plus years, including Ed Ackerman and Gregory Zbitnew’s photocopied animation 5 cents a Copy (1980); Norma Bailey and Ian Elkin’s Goldeye, a story of smoked fish (1983); the late Alan Pakarnyk’s fantastical Adam’s Dream (1989); Abby Elizabeth Falvo’s 2023 seance *666; and Nicole Blundell’s Geometrika, an inner-eye tale about floaters.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman

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