Imagine Winnipeg without its festivals

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This article was published 29/03/2024 (909 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival — a marquee, destination event synonymous with summer in that city and the largest comedy festival in the world — would not be happening this year. The Toronto iteration of the festival has also been cancelled.

The news came as a shock. It’s hard to overstate just how important Just For Laughs Montreal is, not just to the Canadian comedy industry but comedy more broadly. It’s how many comedians — Canadian and otherwise — get their break.

And then, this week, news broke that Toronto’s Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival, was in tumult; the artistic director has quit, along with a number of programmers. This after Hot Docs president Marie Nelson warned that this year’s festival, which runs April 25 to May 5, would be its last if it did not receive more government support. (Last year, 16 Montreal festivals wrote an open letter ahead of the Quebec provincial budget calling for better funding and audience support.)

What’s going on with Canadian arts festivals?

The short answer is: a bunch of overlapping things. Sluggish pandemic recovery and the drying up of corporate sponsorship dollars — the Toronto International Film Festival is parting ways with Bell, for one example — are big ones, which also likely contributes to burnout and uncertainty at the staff level.

If you read this section of the newspaper, then I probably don’t need to tell you why arts festivals are important, but I’m going to reiterate the stakes anyway because I think it’s too easy to take these events — some which have existed for generations — for granted.

These long-running arts festivals are certainly economic drivers, bringing in tourism dollars as well as keeping dollars at home; they also contribute to a city’s identity and cultural fabric. There’s a reason festivals become annual traditions for people; it’s exciting to feel the kinetic buzz of being a part of something.

Taken together, these festivals also contribute to our national identity. Living next door to an entertainment juggernaut, Canada has to work so hard to make things that are truly, uniquely, identifiably ours, and Just For Laughs is one of those things. It’s bigger than a festival; it’s a comedy cornerstone.

With that in mind, I feel the need to take a moment to mount a small defence of Just For Laughs Gags — the silent prank/hidden camera show that’s been running for more than 20 years. Sorry, but it’s good.

People love to rag on Gags, but many of its (shockingly elaborate) pranks live in my head rent-free. The fact it doesn’t need to be translated into any language makes it an excellent cultural export.

What happens if we lose our culture makers? Canadian culture cannot be left to be created, maintained and exported by the CBC alone.

But beyond those more obvious reasons, festivals — live, in-person festivals — remain sites of true discovery. In a world increasingly lived on our phones and content — a word that makes art sound like fast food — delivered to us via algorithm, it’s nice to go somewhere to find your new favourite comedian, band or film curated by passionate people, not bots driven by “engagement.”

It’s hard not to cast a worrying eye to Winnipeg’s arts organizations and summer festivals amid this news. Like Montreal, we too are a city with a thriving festival culture. Imagine losing the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, or the Winnipeg Folk Festival, or New Music Festival, or Folklorama.

Oh wait, we can imagine it, because we lived through years in which there were no festivals.

It’s easy to imagine the things that make our city what it is will always be there. But as we’re seeing elsewhere, being “iconic” or “important” isn’t enough to insulate these vulnerable institutions from existential threats. Nothing is too big, too beloved, too iconic to fail.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com