Wicked and Weird

Dressed for excess: A video still from L'Atelier national du Manitoba's short film Clifford's Ladies Wear.

When renowned experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin summered in Gimli, Man., as a young man, he would string a white sheet up in the backyard of his family cottage to screen his latest work for friends and relatives. Maddin later made the small resort town famous on the art-house circuit with Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), a near-silent black-and-white film about the conflict between Ainar and Gunnar, two Icelanders with small pox.

Maddin’s lakeside home theatre inspired one of the Gimli Film Festival’s most sensual pleasures: movies in the water. Supported by a steel scaffold mounted temporarily in Lake Winnipeg’s hard sandy bottom, a 35-foot screen rises out of the expanse of water. On a clear night, the surface of the immense lake is flat and silvery, but if a prairie storm is coming, waves crash on the beach and the film is backlit by lightning.

“What could be better than being out on the beach watching a film?” asks Walter Forsberg, a founding member of l’Atelier national du Manitoba, the art collective that curates the festival’s extensive short program. “This festival has a sensibility of fun that’s absent in big industry festivals. It’s a cottage country film festival.”

The festival, which ran from Aug. 1 to 5, is also Manitoba’s premier showcase for independent film, says Forsberg, who was raised in Chicago and moved to Winnipeg a year ago to make films. “Two Canadian provinces – Quebec and Manitoba – have distinctive film cultures,” says the co-producer of Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2005). “Many of these really original films just wouldn’t get screened in Manitoba if it wasn’t for Gimli.”

Gimli is renowned as the largest Icelandic settlement outside of Iceland. The festival started in 2000 to commemorate the arrival of Icelanders at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland a millennium ago. “At the first festival, we screened work by Icelandic-Canadian and Icelandic directors. But then we decided to feature work by filmmakers from Circumpolar nations and Manitoba films that wouldn’t get seen otherwise,” explains Senator Janis Gudrun Johnson, who grew up in Gimli and was among the locals who previewed Maddin’s early cinematic efforts. (Maddin, who is half Icelandic, has been an advisor since the festival’s beginnings and usually makes an appearance.)

Illuminating the past: Isabella Rossellini in Guy Maddin's documentary My Dad is 100 Years Old. Photo Jody Shapiro. Courtesy NSI FilmExchange.

Over the past six years, the festival has evolved into an odd but interesting mix of Manitoba independent films and mainstream documentaries and features from the chilly countries that circle the Arctic pole — including, of course, Canada. If there’s one constant at this festival, it’s the use of snow and ice as a backdrop. Icelandic-Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson’s film Beowulf and Grendel (2005), based on the famous Norse myth, was screened here. So was Guy Maddin’s short My Dad is 100 Years Old (written by and starring Isabella Rossellini), as well as Gimli native Norma Bailey’s Ken Leishman: The Flying Bandit, which recounts the remarkable life story of the infamous Manitoba bank robber and escape artist.

The most original part of this year’s Gimli Film Festival – besides the fact that it coincided with the town’s annual Islendingadagurinn, or Icelandic festival, which featured a lifesize replica of a Norse village — was L’Atelier’s short program. It showcased the made-in-Manitoba filmmaking pioneered by directors such as Maddin and John Paizs (Springtime in Greenland, Crime Wave) and continued by artists at the Winnipeg Film Group and Video Pool. L’Atelier maintains that the province’s unique cinematic tradition includes cheesy commercials and television shows made in the 1970s and ’80s (the heyday of Winnipeg community-access cable television). In Gimli, L’Atelier premiered their three-minute ode to what may be one of the worst — and longest-running — ads in Winnipeg’s television history. It’s a spot for Clifford’s Ladies Wear, Winnipeg’s emporium of pastel polyester apparel (a must-stop for fashionable Manitoba ladies throughout the 1970s and 1980s).

In the original ads, the waving and strolling Clifford’s models were superimposed over photographs of Winnipeg landmarks, as the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More played dreamily in the background. In L’Atelier’s version, Clifford’s Ladies Wear (2006), the clothing is as hideous as it was in the 1980s, but the women aren’t quite as cheerful or attractive; one of the models has a moustache and tries to smother her colleague with a pillow. Why replicate an ad? Because, says Forsberg, they are one of the best illustrations of a distinctly Canadian art form. (L’Atelier recently curated “Garbage Hill: A Showcase of Winnipeg’s Discarded Film and Television History” at the Winnipeg Cinematheque.)

The festival also dedicated a full evening to screening new work from the Winnipeg Film Group, including Victoria Prince’s hilarious vaudeville-inspired short Winged Victory (2005), about a sideshow freak named the Chicken Lady, who is relentlessly persecuted by the other members of the troupe. Darryl Nepinak’s Good Morning Native America (2006), a clever five-minute comedy about a talk-show host who broadcasts a local cable show from his living room, won the CanWest Global Best Manitoba Short Award at the festival.

Chips and giggles: A video still from Darryl Nepinak's comedic short Good Morning Native America.

L’Atelier also commissioned Nepinak to put together an evening of films made by aboriginal filmmakers. Nepinak told the sold-out crowd the straightforward goal of the “Indianpeg” program was “to show what Indians have been up to in Winnipeg.” One of the most moving shorts in this program was 2510037901 (2003), artist Steve Loft’s reflection on his mixed Native and Jewish heritage. In this stark and powerful three-minute film, Loft gets his Indian Status card number tattooed on his arm. Finding Joe (2006) was also extraordinary; the drama, about a young man’s struggle to break his pot habit, was written, performed and directed by 16-year-old Winnipegger Stanley Wood. Award-winning Winnipeg filmmaker Ervin Chartrand also contributed two films to the mix: 504923C, about a young prisoner’s attempt to quit a gang; and Patrick Ross, an exquisite six-minute portrait of the titular artist (a former inmate).

The Gimli Film Festival, like Manitoba filmmaking itself, is hard to peg (no pun intended). Some film observers point to common themes of oppression and hardship, others use words such as “neo-gothic,” “dark” and “ironic,” particularly with reference to Maddin’s work and the stuff inspired by it. The independent work screened at this festival is clearly the product of Manitoba’s singular culture, which manages to be bleak and violent, as well as funny and earnest. Is it the harsh climate? Or is it because Winnipeg is a working-class city whose world-class aspirations failed to materialize? Or perhaps it’s the influence of all those hardy cultures (among them Ukrainians, Icelanders, German Mennonites and Jews) that immigrated here.

Manitoba recently changed its provincial slogan from the banal but accurate “Friendly Manitoba” to the dorky “Manitoba Spirited Energy.” Most Manitobans I spoke to hate the new slogan (dreamed up by a consultant for $600,000). After attending the Gimli Film Festival, I think a more accurate moniker might be “Weird Yet Wonderful.”

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.

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