Generosity and ghost stories

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This article was published 28/10/2023 (703 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the National Screen Institute announced a filmmaking competition centred around generosity, Winnipeg’s Alice Teufack didn’t have to look far to find the subject for her first-ever documentary.

“When he heard a new African family arrived in Manitoba, André Doumbè would go to the airport to pick them up and greet them, even when he didn’t know them,” says Teufack, who was born in Cameroon and moved to Canada in 1998 at 17 years old. “I’d never heard of a person like that before.”

Doumbè’s generosity and community activism — he was the longtime president of the African community organization ACOMI and heavily involved in the Cameroonian association Sous Le Baobab — are the focus of Teufack’s documentary, Grande-Frère, which debuts tonight at the Cinemental festival. It was one of five winning films in the NSI competition, commissioned by the Winnipeg Foundation.

To write the documentary, Teufack, a former accountant who quit her job in 2018 to pursue a film degree at the University of Manitoba, worked with the late Doumbè’s family and interviewed several colleagues and friends who’d been touched by his work and generous spirit.

Among the talking heads are Titi Tijani, who ran for the Progressive Conservatives in the most recent election, and former premier Greg Selinger, who in the film praises Doumbè’s dedication to advocating for his community.

As one interviewee says, André transcended nationality, making connections with everyone he met after arriving in Winnipeg in 1988.

A character with such an outsize reputation was the perfect subject for Teufack, who produced the documentary through her company Ninis Productions. Doumbè, who died in 2017, represented to the filmmaker an example of a distinctly Manitoban story.

“When I came here in 2009 (after living in Quebec for 10 years) it was just to stay for two years,” she says. “But the province was warm and welcoming, and I felt at home in a way I never thought I could in Canada.”

“Manitoba is such an underrated province,” she says, and like Doumbè, it deserves to be seen in the spotlight.

Teufack’s lighthearted documentary screened as a 10-minute short earlier in October at the Park Theatre, but a 75-minute version will be showing at Cinémental, held at the Centre culturel franco-manitobain. That version goes into greater detail about African immigration to Manitoba, which has been steadily rising for years.

In 2016, about 18,000 African newcomers lived in Manitoba, making up roughly eight per cent of all local immigrants. As of 2021, those figures had grown to 27,000, or 10.5 per cent of all immigrants to the province, per Statistics Canada.

Grande-Frère is screening tonight at 7 p.m., with English subtitles, in the CCFM’s Pauline-Boutal Hall. Admission is $10.

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While Teufack’s film examines a man who felt like everyone’s uncle, Ryan McKenna’s latest short is built around his actual relative Ben Cormier, whose brush with the supernatural led him to explore a dark chapter in his family’s history.

In 1994, when McKenna was 11 years old, his great-uncle Ben approached him at a family gathering to announce he’d been visited by a ghost.

“He told me he woke up in the middle of the night and his grandfather was sitting at the end of his bed, demanding he find his little girl,” recalls McKenna, born in St. Boniface and currently based in Montreal.

That little girl was Aurore Cormier, who fell ill with smallpox while McKenna’s ancestors ventured west from Quebec to homestead in La Salle, Man. While her siblings, father Moise and mother Marie, arrived at their destination, Aurore died not far from Thunder Bay, Ont., buried in an unmarked grave in a nondescript field after a brutal quarantine.

A century later came the ghostly visit, followed by McKenna’s great-uncle’s trek to find Aurore’s final resting place.

Both journeys are documented in Four Mile Creek, a 12-minute short from McKenna that plays as “a highly stylized ghost story,” in the filmmaker’s words. Told through the actual journal entries of McKenna’s great-great-grandparents, Four Mile Creek is a gut-wrenching and impressive expansion on documentary ideals and the limits of narrative non-fiction storytelling.

The film played at the Vancouver International Film Festival and will screen next month at the Montreal Documentary Film Festival.

McKenna, whose previous Winnipeg-set feature films include 2012’s The First Winter and 2019’s Cranks, is currently in Brazil to present his newest full-length film. Late Night Walks, about the wanderings of a woman dealing with dementia, premièred Friday night at the Sao Paolo International Film Festival.

Four Mile Creek will screen Sunday at 7 p.m., in a double feature with the Quebec thriller Frontiers, presented with English subtitles. Admission is $10.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com