Manitoba credits roll at TIFF Guy Maddin’s latest among seven locally powered films at Toronto fest By: Randall King Posted: 4:30 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 5, 2024

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This article was published 05/09/2024 (724 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In early August, Manitoba Film & Music announced a record-breaking year when it came to the number of film and television productions happening in Manitoba: an astonishing $434.9 million, double the amount of last year, which endured the affliction of both writers’ and actors’ strikes.

Fiscally, it was great news, with the TV- and movie-business dollars trickling through the province’s economy via everything from hotel rooms and rental cars to prop rentals.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily shake out to be a good thing for our own Manitoba filmmakers. In fact, it might serve to sharpen the divide between local artists and the moneyed Hollywood studio types bringing mainstream movies — such as Nobody 2, a sequel to the Bob Odenkirk Netflix hit, and The Long Walk, an adaptation of the Stephen King novella of the same name — to shoot here, taking advantage of some of the most generous tax incentives on the continent.

Fortunately, the Toronto International Film Festival seemed to pick this moment to prove Manitoba filmmakers have some juice of their own. The festival has an unprecedented seven Manitoba-produced films playing in the 49th edition of the festival, which runs to Sept. 15.

Collectively, the films stand as a testament to the power of Manitoba’s homegrown artists, says Manitoba Film & Music CEO Lynne Skromeda.

“We have more stronger creative projects coming out of Manitoba than we’ve ever seen,” says Skromeda, who took the job in August of 2023.

Of the seven films, four are features:

• Rumours, from Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, is a satiric take on a G7 conference visited by apocalyptic circumstances, starring the likes of Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander and Charles Dance. While it was shot in Hungary, it was backed by Manitoba production house Buffalo Gal Pictures, among others.

• Universal Language, from Winnipeg-raised director Matthew Rankin, posits a parallel-world Winnipeg in a Canada where the official languages are French and Farsi. Like Rumours, it was a hit at Cannes, where it earned the first Director’s Fortnight Audience Award. In August, it was announced as Canada’s official entry to the Academy Awards in the category of Best International Feature Film.

• Aberdeen, directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas and produced by Farpoint Pictures, shows a Winnipeg that feels all too real in a story about an Indigenous woman (Gail Maurice of Night Raiders and Bones of Crows) on a journey to reclaim her identity, literally, as she struggles to find a way to rescue her grandchildren from foster care.

• The Mother and the Bear comes from Chinese-Canadian director Johnny Ma, who has called this fanciful story “a love letter to Winnipeg.” Certainly, the city provides a snowy setting where a Korean mom (a very charming Kim Ho Jung) travels to care for her daughter, who has gone into a coma after slipping on an icy Exchange District street.

In addition to those, three short films play in the festival’s multiple shorts series, all coming from artists who have shown films at TIFF before. Métis artist Rhayne Vermette returns to experimental short-form animation with A Black Screen Too in the Wavelengths series, after making her TIFF feature debut, Ste. Anne, in 2021

Ian Bawa wrote and directed The Best, a kind of sequel to his 2020 short film Strong Son, which saw the filmmaker cast his own father (Jandeep Singh Bawa) as a stern adviser to his bodybuilding son (Mandeep Sodhi). Reflecting the real-life death of his dad, Bawa recasts Sodhi as a son attempting to come to grips with the father’s death through sheer bluster before trying a shocking therapy of his own devising.

Bawa first came to TIFF with fellow filmmakers Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco with the bizarre 2016 short Imitations. Mitrovic and Velasco return as the co-directors of Serve the Country, which casts Mitrovic as a compulsive liar whose efforts to make money via “stolen valour” end disastrously.

By getting into TIFF, the films have earned their way to a world stage, Skromeda says.

“TIFF is a huge event. It is an international film festival on par with Venice and Cannes and Sundance, so to have this kind of recognition, where we are up against all the best films in the world, it shows we’re holding our ground and we can produce things that are on par with those kind of projects,” she says.

“And I just think it’s exciting that people are seeing the specialness of the place that we live.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Randall King
Writer

Randall King writes about film for the Winnipeg Free Press.