Manitoba-made films to stream on small screens

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This article was published 29/04/2021 (1637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two locally shot feature films are coming home in May, and a third will première in June.

Stand!, the feature film based on the play Strike: The Musical by Danny Schur and Rick Chafe, is coming to Canadian video-on-demand platforms on Tuesday, May 18.

Another feature, Percy, starring Christopher Walken as Saskatchewan canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, will be viewable free in Manitoba on Thursday, May 6, at 7 p.m. via WFP Movie Night.

The latter film, shot in 2018 on Manitoba locations including Stonewall, Elie, Selkirk, Rockwood and Starbuck, will be screened courtesy of the film’s Canadian distributor, Mongrel Media, which happens to be launching its own streaming service on April 30.

Percy will not be immediately available on the Mongrel site at MongrelHomeCinema.com when it goes live on Friday. Instead, Percy will be going to on-demand platforms. The WFP Movie Night event just allows Manitobans to see the film free of charge, with guests offering a running live-chat commentary. Register for free at wfp.to/movies and you will receive a password via email one hour before the event.

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Writer-composer Danny Schur had high hopes of a wider theatrical release for Stand! since the film premiered in 2019. Because Hollywood studios had shelved most of their bigger releases at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Schur expressed hope the film would sneak past the studio gatekeepers into American cinemas. But the widespread closure of theatres prevented those plans from being realized.

“Like the rest of the world, and the movie industry in particular, COVID made mincemeat of plans,” Schur says. “Stand! was initially going to have a theatrical release in 1,200 theatres in the U.S. on the 2020 Labour Day long weekend. We postponed twice, only to see COVID numbers rise and more theatres close.

“But if COVID has taught the world anything, it’s that life is a pivot,” Schur says. “The VOD release, although a year delayed, finally brings us the North America-wide audience that most movies would kill for.”

Stand! will be available to American audiences earlier on video-on-demand platforms, including Apple TV and iTunes, commencing May 1, which is International Workers Day. The later May 18 date for Canada was deliberate, Schur says.

“That date was specifically chosen to be the Tuesday after May 15 — the anniversary of the start of the (Winnipeg) General Strike (in 1919),” Schur says. “Our Toronto distributor, Vortex, acknowledges that Winnipeg history drove the making of the film and history should be acknowledged in this release.”

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Mongrel Media’s new streaming service, created in partnership with Magnolia Pictures, will kick off with with a selection of celebrated features from around the world, including Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt and Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz.

The service also offers cult fare including Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Lobster, Holy Motors, Under the Skin and the great Swedish horror entry Let the Right One In.

“Cinema lovers regularly tell us that they spend more time on platforms searching for films than actually watching them,” said Mongrel Media president Hussain Amarshi in a press release. “We’ve responded to that sentiment by bringing a carefully curated collection of films under one roof, creating a service that will make subscribers feel as if they are entering a boutique rather than a big-box store.”

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A third locally shot film will be coming to streaming services in June.

The Ice Road, starring Liam Neeson, is being released digitally by VVS on June 25. The action movie, written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh, cast Neeson as a truck driver on a race across frozen water to rescue workers in a collapsed northern diamond mine. It is being released on Netflix in the U.S., but not Canada.

The movie was shot in Manitoba in February and March of 2020, wrapping days after the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://youtu.be/v0GbZM8BbaM

The film’s mission-based adventure was inspired by The Wages of Fear, a 67-year-old French film about four men delivering a shipment of nitroglycerine to a remote South American oilfield. In an interview with the Free Press, producer Bart Rosenblatt said another inspiration was a History Channel reality series produced in part by Manitoba production company Eagle Vision.

“Jonathan wanted to do a movie that was set on the ice roads because he was familiar with the series Ice Road Truckers,” Rosenblatt said. “So he thought that he could do a Wages of Fear-inspired ice-road movie which is what he wrote in his original screenplay.”

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing