Neighbour Andy celebrating sophomore album with October show

Neighbour Andy is swinging for the fences.

The rising Winnipeg indie-rock band has booked Burton Cummings Theatre, one of the city’s largest music venues, to celebrate the release of its sophomore album, Right By You, By Everyone.

“It’s a massive leap and we’re sort of betting on ourselves, but we feel very ready for it,” keyboardist Joel d’Eschambault says of the Oct. 24 hometown headlining show.

Taking a leap and figuring things out on the fly is part of the band’s DNA.

Bookman brings roving kiosk of literary treasures to fringe

Every superhero has a true identity: Superman is Clark Kent, Captain Canuck is Tom Evans and Wonder Woman is Diana Prince.

Ukrainian influencer learning, sharing all he can about Manitoba home

In Andrian Makhnachov’s first nine days as a Winnipegger, he immersed himself in the city’s most distinctive delights. He went to the Goldeyes’ Ukrainian Night, toured the Manitoba Museum and cheered the Sea Bears at Canada Life Centre.

Christopher Nolan crafts modern epic, brings wartime saga home

Months before this week’s release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, the film was already being criticized for being too “woke,” insufficiently manly, overly casual and not faithful enough to the original 2,800-year-old poem.

There was a lot of online griping about the historical inaccuracy of the armour, the helmets and the boats. (These accusations about lack of realism being made, mind you, against a story that also includes a one-eyed, man-eating giant, a six-headed sea monster and a sorceress who can turn men into pigs.)

If you’re willing to approach it on its own terms, Nolan’s cinematic epic is magnificent, moving and visually astonishing. And — putting to one side those quibbles about period-specific Bronze Age breastplates — his take ends up being “realistic” in a much more profound sense: even sequences reaching toward mythic heights remain grounded in fundamental and enduring human questions about love and loyalty, death and war, time and age.

Worrying about fidelity to the original also seems by-the-by. The Odyssey is a foundational text that weaves through centuries of re-imaginings in literature and art. Even the comparatively brief history of cinema offers up several adaptations, from a 1905 silent short by Georges Méliès, to a (sadly) unrealized Ray Harryhausen Claymation version in the 1990s, to the Coen Brothers’ antic musical O Brother, Where Art Thou? from 2000.

Manitoba documentary focuses lens on environmental defenders, beauty of prairies

Everything We Need Is Here is the latest sumptuously shot Manitoba film rooted in the Prairie landscape.

Though totally unrelated in subject matter, the documentary recalls the 2024 Daughters of the Sun with its saturated and slow-mo sweeps across boreal forests and limestone tinted lakes.

But while Daughters has much murmured narration and arthouse flair, Everything is a plucky film, a can-do sort of doc about the land and its grassroots defenders.

Their voices resonate strong and clear across storylines that weave together the joys of foraging and local environmental protests.

U of M students add malt barley roots to chocolate for nutritious treat

The brewing industry isn’t known for being health conscious but, for a team of University of Manitoba students, it was the key to creating a chocolate bar that combines nutrition and indulgence.

Winnipeg Fringe Festival: 2026 show reviews

Not sure what to see at this year's Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival? All of the Free Press’s reviews will be published here.  Find a show and click to read its review.

Artist Bistyek enjoys the freedom of living a creative life in full colour

In pants nearly as wide at the ankle as a downtown sidewalk, Bistyek cuts a striking silhouette on his daily marches through the Exchange District, an area the painter has made his muse since arriving in Winnipeg nine years ago.

He likes it here, loves it even, but as he’s established himself as one of the city’s most vibrant visual artists — with a street-honed style that pays homage to both Japanese anime series Dragon Ball Z and graffiti-inspired American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat — Bistyek won’t forget where he came from: he can’t.

Though the 30-year-old has built an enviable life here, he’s eminently aware that his circumstances are defined as much by sheer luck as they are by determination or talent. When he was growing up in Afrin, a village in Syria, his family was torn apart by civil war and discrimination against the Kurdish minority under the rule of dictator Bashar al Assad.

“I was living in Lebanon as a refugee for seven years, with a big group of friends, but day after day they started to cross the sea from Turkey or Greece. Some of them made it, some of them did not,” says the artist born Ormeya Zagros. “I turned to Mom and said, ‘I want to go across the sea. I cannot stay here. I don’t see a future here. I don’t see opportunities. There is so much discrimination and racism. I cannot build a life.’”

Winnipeg Folk Festival attendees brave scorching temps at Birds Hill

“I’m sorry for subjecting you to my British knees,” U.K. singer-songwriter Billy Bragg said at his Sunday workshop at the 51st Winnipeg Folk Festival. “Sometimes you have to make a choice between being cool and looking cool.”

He wasn’t alone in choosing the former; the fest at Birds Hill Pro-vincial Park, which sold out in advance, featured no shortage of creative heat-beating apparel.

First-aid volunteers wandered through the crowd misting overheat-ed fans with water and crowds largely stuck to treed areas.

Some ticket holders certainly stayed home on Sunday, when the humidex reached 47 C and shade was a hot commodity but many stuck it out to see acts from Sweden, Liberia, Lithuania, Wales, Benin and our own backyard heat up a multitude of stages over the course of the four-day event.

Free Press recommendations on whose sets folkies should check out

Musical discovery is a central tenet of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which takes place Thursday through Sunday at Birds Hill Provincial Park. Keep reading for a round-up, curated by Free Press staff, of acts playing the festival for the first time.

Roughing it (less): Handy items for novice campers to make the great outdoors tolerable

I hate camping.

I loathe the very idea of leaving the comfort and safety of home to sleep in a random field, where not only will I be exposed to the elements, but will also be at the mercy of all manner of creatures, from ursine to canine to insectan.

I do not want to hike up a hill just to share one outdoor tap with 12 others, standing alongside them as I brush my teeth.

I do not want to queue for 15 minutes, then part with a $2 coin to wedge myself into a shower stall just to stand under a piddly stream of lukewarm water while trying my best to swiftly soap up and sponge off lest I irk the rapidly growing line of campers outside.

Manitoba-shot Netflix series sets beloved Ingalls clan in the actual Prairies

Perhaps it should not have been a significant surprise that Manitoba was chosen as the location for a new iteration of the much-beloved TV series Little House on the Prairie.

Much of the southern part of the province is, after all, authentic Prairie, visually unspoiled by power lines and paved roads.

And there is enough of it to portray a frontier wilderness that matches the source material: a series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, set in and around Independence, Kan., in the 1860s. (Manitoba also famously doubled for Kansas in the movie Capote, the Oscar-winning story of Truman Capote’s investigation of a 1959 quadruple homicide on a Kansas farm, culminating in the publication of his book In Cold Blood.)

Perhaps it was more of a surprise that the material would inspire a new interpretation landing on the streaming service Netflix.

Whitemouth guest house’s weekly ’za nights prove popular

WHITEMOUTH — It’s a sunny Friday afternoon and Michel Dupas is busy stoking the fire inside Rusty’s glowing red maw. The outdoor pizza oven — named for its intentionally rustic construction — takes hours to reach the ideal internal temperature and customers could be arriving soon. Emphasis on could.

“You never really know who’s going to come,” shrugs Michel, who runs Moon Gate Guest House and its weekly pizza nights with his wife Jenny Dupas.

Moon Gate is a charming riverside bed and breakfast located off a gravel road 100 kilometres east of Winnipeg in the RM of Whitemouth.

When the couple purchased the property in 2009, it was home to little more than an aging farmhouse and an abandoned egg sorting facility. But the land had potential — and 400-amp electrical service.

Influential editor leaving Border Crossings after 33 years at the helm

They say that a picture tells a thousand words, but also not to judge a book by its cover.

Meeka Walsh isn’t much one for platitudes. Surveying three decades of Border Crossings’ covers, the back stories she gives — relaying what the pictures may only hint at — are peppered with qualities one recognizes from her writing as the magazine’s flagship editor: the ironic asides, the sculpted turns of phrase and the innocent name-dropping.

Walsh says she remembers every cover, too — though some are judged more warmly than others, even in an exalted light.

Currently, she’s eying the great Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank’s Watching the Crows on issue no. 152 from February 2020. Frank’s best known for his landmark The Americans — a sad, funny, rambling road chronicle of postwar America, a little like On the Road in pictures, that also electrified Jack Kerouac.