Echoes of Winnipeg

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This article was published 28/01/2016 (3912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For decades, Winnipeg has been home to some of the most distinctive filmmakers in Canada.

Disconcertingly, many seem to be jumping ship in some capacity or other to la belle province, judging by homegrown auteurs such as Montreal-based Matthew Rankin (Mynarski Death Plummet) and Guy Maddin, who shot much of his recent feature The Forbidden Room in Montreal’s Phi Centre.

Raised in St. Boniface, Ryan McKenna qualifies as a dyed-in-the-wool Winnipeg Film Group-spawn on the basis of some Winnipeg-centric films: Survival Lessons: The Greg Klymkiw Story (2013), a documentary portrait of the firebrand producer of Tales from the Gimli Hospital; Controversies, a short documentary ode to the Peter Warren-hosted radio talk show Action Line; and, most auspiciously, The First Winter (2012), an ultra-low-budget comedy about a Portuguese emigre’s first winter in Winnipeg, which necessitated McKenna shooting the city at its most hideous in a comically horrific style he dubbed “Winnipeg brutalism.”

Here’s the thing: McKenna, 33, has lived in Montreal since 2008.

“I’ve come back to Winnipeg for some periods, back and forth,” he says, explaining he shot The First Winter over 10 months in 2010-11.

“I identify as a Winnipeg filmmaker because my formative years were with the Winnipeg Film Group and I continue to come back and make films here.”

But McKenna’s status might change with the première of his French-language film The Heart of Madame Sabali, which he will introduce Thursday evening in his Winnipeg Film Group stomping grounds at Cinematheque.

The film, about a heart-transplant recipient who begins to experience the memories and sensations of her Malian donor, was shot entirely in Quebec — an enterprise McKenna admits was made easier by Quebec’s approach to film funding.

“The way I made films here in Winnipeg was through arts council money, so I would always apply to the Manitoba Arts Council or the Canada Arts Council and that’s how I made The First Winter… with a much smaller amount of money,” he says.

“With Telefilm, I didn’t have the track record and the more conventional-style projects that they look for, so what was lucky about Quebec was I was able to apply to the SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles) which was their big provincial funding body. They almost fund the same amount of money as Telefilm.

“So they were interested in this odd, unique project right away, and once they came on board, we were able to get Telefilm on board later on,” McKenna says.

“This would have been a difficult film for me to make in Winnipeg, having not made a film with a more significant budget. SODEC enabled it to happen.”

Another enabler was McKenna’s partner in both life and creativity, Becca Blackwood, who “did the art direction and costumes and helped write the story.”

“She was really interested in the concept of cellular memory, that organs can retain the memory of their donor,” McKenna says. “This is a real thing you can read about on the Internet, where you hear stories of a kid getting a heart transplant. and all of a sudden he can speak a different language, and it turns out it’s the language his donor spoke.”

McKenna was intrigued by that premise, coupled with an opportunity to indulge a musical taste for the Grammy-nominated Malian performers Amadou & Mariam.

“They’ve played all over the world and they’ve won all kinds of awards, and I was really inspired by their music,” he says. “So I thought it would really be fun to put them in the movie if possible. They live in Paris, but they come from Mali, so I decided to make the transplant donor of Malian descent in order to have them be in the film.”

Rounding out the inspirations was McKenna’s affection for Quebec actress Marie Brassard, a mainstay in French-Canadian cinema.

“I just really wanted to work with her,” he says of Brassard, who also appears in Maddin’s The Forbidden Room. “I was thinking of someone who is open to life’s possibilities to go on this surreal, strange adventure. Someone open and not cynical and jaded. So I wrote a character for her to play.”

McKenna says the reception for the film in Quebec has been positive.

“They’ve been open-hearted and open-minded and the Quebec industry people have been really enthusiastic,” he says, adding his name has not proved to be a barrier.

“I’m three-quarters Franco-Manitoban and one-quarter Irish, so I have an Irish name but I grew up in the francophone community,” he says.

What’s next?

“I’m writing some new scripts at the moment and I’ll see where that takes me,” McKenna says. “Now that I’ve made a film with proper financing, I might be able to make a film here in Winnipeg with Telefilm money. Who knows?”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca