Wide-angle lens Expansive new book picks up where Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group film left off By: Ben Waldman Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Apr. 6, 2023

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This article was published 06/04/2023 (928 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first time Kevin Nikkel walked into a Winnipeg Film Group workshop, he was a little bit scared. An introvert, he preferred to look at the world from a distance, but on that day in 1998 or 1999, he found himself amid a maelstrom of creative talent.

“There were all these great expectations,” says Nikkel, a filmmaker, teacher and writer. “In the early stages of creating, it’s almost like a bunch of puppies at the pet store, and everyone is kind of stumbling over themselves.”

Soon he was hooked. And if he were to wear a collar, his ID tag might read, “If found: please return to the Winnipeg Film Group.”

Over the next 25 years, Nikkel became enamoured with and engrossed by the story of the film group, which upon its founding in 1974 became the fulcrum of the city’s independent cinema movement. Arriving too late to have witnessed the group’s earliest days, which were spent in the McDermot Avenue warehouse known as the Bate Building, or at a peculiar house on Adelaide Street, Nikkel took his historian’s training and visual eye and fixed both firmly on the past.

After agreeing to direct a project during a backyard barbecue, Nikkel collaborated with the late Cinematheque ideologue and programmer Dave Barber to produce the documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, a titular play on Tales from the Gimli Hospital, a 1988 feature by Guy Maddin produced by the group — a touchstone for local film history. The 2017 documentary, with a jazzy freedom, rolls through the film group’s early days and into the present.

But Nikkel, and Barber, felt there was more meat on the bone. “It’s always been a frustration of mine to sit down and do a nice interview with someone, but then I only end up using a handful of clips,” Nikkel says during a Zoom interview, well aware the same thing is about to happen to him. “It just so bothers me. Oh man, if people could just see the whole conversation, because there are beautiful arcs where it begins, and then we kind of go off on this trail, and we come back around.”

So Nikkel, often accompanied by Barber, got to work conducting and compiling interviews with several seminal figures from every era in the Winnipeg Film Group’s history. The resulting work, Establishing Shots: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Film Group, is an important document of not just Winnipeg’s cinematic history, but of the city’s resilient reputation as an artistic and creative oasis.

The 437-page book, read in or out of order, shows the ways the film group has been forced to adapt to changing times, and how, despite the passage of nearly 50 years, it has maintained its foundationally scrappy, independent spirit. (A launch will be held April 12 at Dave Barber Cinematheque.)

Across 33 conversations with early WFG filmmakers like Maddin, Elise Swerhone and Allan Kroeker, administrators like Merit Jensen and Leon Johnson, and other alums such as Shawna Dempsey, Lorri Millan, Danishka Esterhazy and Scott Fitzpatrick, Nikkel lets his curiosity drive his questioning for the reader’s benefit. At times academic and technical, the book’s ultimate reason for existing is that none like it existed before.

In his introduction, Nikkel subdivides the film group’s history according to its home bases, including its inaugural home, the Bate Building on McDermot. Gene Walz, an American who was recruited to teach film studies at the University of Manitoba in 1974 and decided to stick around, describes his first visit to the building thusly in his interview with Nikkel.

“A great building with a beautiful wrought-iron elevator. There were usually prostitutes in the doorway that we had to fight our way through to get up to the meetings. It wasn’t a conducive place for meetings. The rooms were small and they were crowded and noisy.” Humble beginnings.

Once the film group started making films, however, the output began to make the setting of those meetings irrelevant. Early works, such as 1976’s Rabbit Pie, and John Paizs’ 1985 film Crime Wave foretold the types of films the group would excel at making: collaborative, strange, and free-spirited works that acted simultaneously as training grounds for its members, who would then go on to pass those lessons along as they worked on films created down the road.

What came of those somewhat chaotic, yet still halcyon days was a distinct approach to filmmaking in a Winnipeg way. In his introduction, Nikkel quotes Lucy Lippard, a New York writer who said that, in art, regionalism was not a limitation, but an advantage.

Filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, whose Ste. Anne showed at both the Berlin and Toronto international film festivals, tells Nikkel, “Because we are Winnipeg, and we’re not Toronto or Vancouver … nobody really cares what we’re doing, so we might as well do what we want. We can find freedom and liberation and that is what I’m trying to do.”

“I think a lot of Winnipeggers and Winnipeg artists are trying to make peace with this idea of where we’re from,” says Nikkel. “The whole idea of regionalism is really important for us to become more confident, and I think there has been a change over the last couple of decades where people are recognizing the value of community.

“I think one of the key things we have going for us is the size of our city. The potential for collaboration between generations and mediums can happen here because there are less people. The pond is smaller.” The ripples are, therefore, much more noticeable.

Nikkel aptly summarizes the film group’s history in his introduction as “less a story about waves and more like a river, widening evermore as it reaches toward the sea.”

The waters have been at times treacherous. One crisis, long since averted, came when, by mistake, the film group lost its charitable status and could no longer give tax receipts to donors. Meanwhile, the film group has never been immune to societal barriers and biases.

Interviews with filmmakers such as Dempsey and Millan, who made queer and feminist films like We’re Talking Vulva, touch on the fact that for many years, the film group had a reputation as a boy’s club. “I was always one of the very few women making movies, with an awful lot of white men,” filmmaker Shereen Jerrett tells Nikkel. “Anybody who was a women, a visible minority, Indigenous — they were struggling. It was so hard to break in. (Winnipeg filmmaker) Winston Moxam (the late African Canadian filmmaker of films such as Barbara James, who Nikkel interviewed) would say the same thing, if he was around.”

As those issues began to be addressed more head-on, the pandemic brought on another challenging period. Along with lockdowns, which restricted theatre attendance, the film group was rattled in 2021, when executive director Greg Klymkiw, who is interviewed in Nikkel’s book, was removed from his post amid accusations of a toxic work environment. Klymkiw has since been replaced by Leslie Supnet, who Nikkel interviewed for the book in 2015, several years before she returned from Toronto.

Klymkiw’s exit was also followed by the sudden death of Barber, who for nearly 40 years was the film group’s beloved senior programmer.

Last year, the film group’s theatre was officially redubbed the Dave Barber Cinematheque, while workshops have been well attended. Meanwhile, programmers Jaimz Asmundson and Olivia Norquay have done a fine job steering the ship, Nikkel says.

To close his interview with Supnet, Nikkel asks her what the future will hold. She gives a rather prophetic, pre-pandemic answer.

“Well, the future is generally kind of bleak. Ha ha!” she starts, later adding that “the future is so big. It’s why I continue to make things. It is a real helpful antidote to the depression about the coming apocalypse.”

And thanks to Nikkel’s book, whoever takes the wheel will have a handy guide at their disposal to help them navigate whatever comes next.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com