Fledgling feature turns 50

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This article was published 03/06/2024 (876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

These days, Leonard Yakir’s best claim to fame as a filmmaker may be as the writer and producer of the cult film Out of the Blue, the Dennis Hopper-directed slice-of-grungy-life from 1980.

But six years before making that film, Yakir himself directed a comparatively gentle drama titled The Mourning Suit under the auspices of the fledgling Winnipeg Film Group (of which Yakir was a founding member).

As the WFG is on the cusp of its 50th anniversary, The Mourning Suit, billed as the first homegrown Winnipeg feature film, is having its own restoration and revival.

Made on a shoestring budget of $125,000, the drama will be featured at both the Winnipeg International Jewish Film Festival and the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. (In Winnipeg, it screens Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Berney Theatre on the Asper Jewish Community Campus.)

On the phone from his home in rural Massachusetts, Yakir, “77 and still kicking,” says he will attend both festivals, but it will be a homecoming to Winnipeg, where he was born and where he began his filmmaking career, first as a documentarian (the 1972 short Mainstreet Soldier) and then into dramatic features.

The Mourning Suit’s story was co-written by Yakir and his friend Joe Wiesenfeld, who would go on to an illustrious career working on Canadian properties such as Anne of Green Gables and the TV miniseries St. Urbain’s Horseman.

“He lived down the block from me,” Yakir says of Wiesenfeld, who died in 2019.

“We both had similar backgrounds in that we came from families that were survivors of the Holocaust, living in Winnipeg.”

The film centres on the tortured figure of cellist Herschel, played by future film director Allan Moyle (Pump Up the Volume). Returning to his hometown in the aftermath of his father’s death, Herschel moves into a studio in an Exchange District warehouse, where he finds a friend in Kramer (Norman Taviss), an elderly Jewish tailor working out his own issues with his estranged son.

The film’s setting came to Yakir after his own father Abraham retired.

“My dad had a clothing manufacturing business in the garment district in Winnipeg, and I grew up in that milieu. At the time, previous to The Mourning Suit, he was closing up his factory and he was retiring from the factory world,” Yakir says.

“So I helped to move machines into a space until they got rid of them, and I was kind of struck by the transition from the hub of factory life, the cacophony of daily life in a clothing factory. I could see this world coming to an end.”

Yakir studied filmmaking at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), but he acknowledges making the feature in a city without film infrastructure was a bigger bite than he expected.

“It was difficult. The (Winnipeg) Film Group was forming as we were putting it together. I remember walking out at the end of the first week of shooting in a four-week shoot and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got three more weeks of this? How will I survive?’” he says, adding he is gratified for the renewed interest in the film, which became manifest when it was invited to screen by two different Jewish film festivals.

“It’s delightful. It’s very nice, somebody waking you up in the middle of the night saying, ‘You know that film we did 50 years ago? We’re interested.’ And then somebody else calls you too, and they’re interested.

“It’s nice that it has a meaning to people.”

The Winnipeg International Jewish Film Festival runs to June 22.

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