Intorducing Canadian Cinema!
Meet great films and great directors at Cinematheque’s Cinema Lounge
EVAN JOHNSON STAFF
Canadian cinema! Now that I’ve lost your attention, allow me to try to win it back. Now I’m no patriot (I’m a traitor if anything), but it seems to me that Canadian film needs some support if it’s going to be seen and heard, even in Canada, amidst the stentorian bombast of Hollywood’s overpowering marketing campaigns. Which is to say: Canadians make movies too, some of them are good, and, more often than not, you’ve never heard of them.
Which, more often than not in Winnipeg, is where Cinematheque comes in. Starting Jan. 26, Cinematheque will be presenting its Cinema Lounge series on a more or less weekly basis. According to Dave Barber, Cinematheque programmer, the goal of the series is to “promote Canadian and Winnipeg work, and to try to stimulate dialogue and discussion about it.”
“We’ve invited a number of Winnipeg filmmakers,” said Barber, “as well as John Paizs who used to live in Winnipeg and now lives in Toronto, to choose a film, a Canadian work, and introduce it, say what’s important about it.”
Along with the legendary Paizs, who on Feb. 23 will be introducing a trio of his early short(ish) films, Cinema Loungers can expect to hear from Coral Aiken, Bill MacGillivray, Walter Forsberg, Patrick Lowe, and Jonathan Ball.
Kicking off the series on Jan. 19, Aiken, a local choreographer and filmmaker, will be introducing Bruce MacDonald’s Roadkill, a film which had the distinction of being declared Best Canadian Feature at the 1990 Toronto Film Festival. MacDonald, upon receiving the honour, shocked stuffed-shirts and impressed me by promising that he would spend the $25,000 cash prize on “a big chunk of hash.” He later went on to direct Hard Core Logo and no fewer than nine episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, which, chances are, is more Degrassi episodes than you’ve directed.
On Jan. 26, celebrated Atlantic Canadian filmmaker Bill MacGillivray will introduce his own 1987 film Life Classes, which concerns the struggles of a young Cape-Bretonian woman who moves to Halifax and, to support her daughter, models at an art school. The following week, on Feb. 2, Walter Forsberg, local filmmaker and founder of WNDX, Winnipeg’s foremost experimental film screening series, will be introducing Montreal filmmaker Robert Morin’s 1994 film Yes Sir! Madame . . . , which, I read on the Internet, is “funny and disturbing.” Perhaps more evocative is the film’s blurb in Cinematheque’s program, which hilariously describes it as a document of one MP’s “descent into manic existential separatism.”
Writer/filmmaker Patrick Lowe will be introducing the Feb. 9 screening of Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero. Pearson’s 1973 film charts a small-town Saskatchewan hockey player’s burgeoning and unfounded belief that he is actually an Old West gunslinger.
On Feb. 17, while your head is still ringing from the excessive fanfare that will be accompanying that weekend’s release of mega-stupid and almost certainly worthless comic-book blockbuster Ghost Rider, you can hear Jonathan Ball introduce Winnipeg filmmaker Jeff Erbach’s The Nature of Nicholas, which has been described by Ball as “a grim prairie fable” and a tale “of suffocation and implosion.”
Finally, as previously mentioned, John Paisz will introduce the Feb. 23 screening of his own short films The Obsession of Billy Botksi, Oak, Ivy and Other Dead Elms, and Springtime in Greenland. Paizs’ short films, according to Barber, “really put Winnipeg on the map as a place where original work comes from.” It’s a remarkable opportunity to see these strange films; Ghost Rider can wait.
