Director roars about making film during Winnipeg winter

TORONTO — To fans of Guy Maddin’s 2007 film My Winnipeg, the opening tune heard in Johnny Ma’s comedy-drama The Mother and the Bear – the ’50s-era promotional anthem Wonderful Winnipeg – will ring familiar. (“It’s no Eden that you would see, but it’s home sweet home to me.”)

This is deliberate. Ma, who was born in Shanghai and moved to Canada at the age of 10, intended the song’s inclusion as an oblique tribute to Maddin and his work.

Indeed, if it weren’t for Maddin and other local filmmakers, it is doubtful Ma would have set his story in Winnipeg in the first place.

Ma premièred The Mother and the Bear during the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival — the same festival that featured Rumours, the international satire co-directed by local boys Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson (the brothers also have a production credit on Ma’s film), as well as Universal Language, Matthew Rankin’s celebrated comedy that, like The Mother and the Bear, offers an often surreal portrait of Winnipeg that still somehow feels familiar.

Ma’s story was inspired by an incident he experienced during a film festival in Seoul in which a hostel manager intensely quizzed him about the dating world in North America. It emerged the woman was worried about her Korean daughter living in Cincinnati.

That incident was transformed into a comedic drama about a Korean mother who races halfway across the world to be with her comatose daughter, who slipped and hit her head on an icy sidewalk.

The mom, played by the Korean actress Kim Ho-jung, takes up residence in her daughter’s apartment, and resolves to set her up with a nice Korean-Canadian man she meets after fainting in a convenience store.

When the film’s Chilean backers, including director Pablo Larrain (Spencer), partnered with the venerable Canadian production company Rhombus Media, they suggested Ma transplant his story to Canada.

“I thought that they were going to mention Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and those cities, and I was just thinking: ‘But that’s not the story! It doesn’t work there!’” Ma says.

“When (Rhombus Media) producer Niv Fichman said Winnipeg, I was literally about to fight him on whatever he was going to say. But I said, ‘Wait, that is really interesting,’ because as a Canadian filmmaker, I have always been fascinated by Winnipeg filmmakers because their art is so different from anything that you can ever see in Canada or the world.”

By the time the movie was finished shooting in April 2023, Ma was enamoured with the city; he has referred to the film as his “love letter to Winnipeg.”

‘Maybe it was the cold or maybe it was something else, but when I actually was living there, it felt like I was living in a Christmas card or a fairy tale, because it was just so beautiful’

“I always took this as an opportunity to learn about Winnipeg, and what I learned about it was that there is a kindness in the cold,” Ma says.

For Ma, the film came at the right time.

“I had lost my father two years before, and we had the pandemic. I needed to be in Winnipeg and that place nurtured me. It was the place I was the most creative I’ve ever felt in Canada,” he says.

“So it was for me a thank-you letter back to Winnipeg because that’s who I made the film for in some ways.”

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The Mother and the Bear is anchored by a lovely performance from indie actress Kim Ho-jung, who, through a combination of sensitivity and eccentricity, fleshes out the character of an overbearing, intrusive Asian mom, a fairly well-worn trope.

Speaking through an interpreter, the actress says coming to the city from Korea resulted in a bit of culture shock, not to mention climate shock, given Korea’s comparatively temperate climate.

“I laid over in Toronto and I went to Winnipeg from there, and from the windows on the plane I could see the field covered in snow,” she says. “And so my first thought was: How do I film here for two months?”

Kim warmed to the place, at least metaphorically speaking.

“Maybe it was the cold or maybe it was something else, but when I actually was living there, it felt like I was living in a Christmas card or a fairy tale because it was just so beautiful,” she says.

“And all the time that I spent there is now like a dream, a memory from a dream. The weather, the views, the crew, Johnny, and everyone from different cultures coming all together. And everyone had such warm hearts. That’s my impression of Winnipeg now.”

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