Filmexchange Returns
Projecting prairie populism to uncharted heights
EVAN JOHNSON STAFF
As the National Screen Institute prepares to descend on Winnipeg for its annual FilmExchange Canadian Film Festival (Feb. 28 to March 3), I think it’s time to examine, in that polite, inquisitive, and purposeless Canadian way, why this impressive festival hasn’t yet incorporated Winnipeg into its official name.
The word “exchange,” I think, offers the key. FilmExchange has been a Winnipeg festival for the past seven years, but has yet to let any kind of elitist civic pride besmirch the façade of its commendable socialist title. No “Winnipeg Film Festival” for us. What are we, Toronto, that solipsistic, smog-propelled dirigible of corporate smut? No, for us it’s “FilmExchange”; our films have been toiled over in the fields, driven into town in the backs of pickup trucks, to be screened for all in giant, rustic silos. The spirit of the 1919 general strike lives on in this very festival.
As usual, FilmExchange 2007 features a wide variety of film programming and a number of panels, lectures, and classes. There are seven feature films, most famously Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, as well as four hour-and-a-half programs of Canadian short films and an additional program, titled First Stories — Saskatchewan, of documentary shorts created by aboriginal filmmakers. There’s also the famous opening-night snowscreen at the Forks, which this year will feature a series of National Film Board animation shorts. Yes that’s right: a screen made of snow. What’s next? A muffler shop made of cottage-cheese?
Another notable part of the festival is the so-called Amateur Movie Contest, which has a degrading title, but features 12 home-brewed movies by generally un-funded young filmmakers. The real beauty for the power-hungry is that you, the average, untalented, unremarkable nobody, can act as enlightened despot for a day and participate in determining the winner through, wait for it, online voting. Ah! Just typing those words sends a shiver of ecstasy down my slouching spine. These online votes will be tallied in conjunction with results from the traditional analog voting, to take place with a screening of the films Saturday, March 3 at 5 p.m. in an extravagant event hosted by genius’s own Ace Burpee. The winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000, while those that fail to win one of eight prizes will be relegated to the cold, cruel gulags of loserdome, to be completely and utterly forgotten about.
Among the finalists is Fire Hazard, a dark and atmospheric little ditty from U of M film student Kyle Sanderson. “It’s a really difficult thing to make a movie that will engage an audience in five minutes without it being a flashy MTV-style music video,” said Sanderson. “I’d seen some other five-minute movies that had to throw their message in your face, so really what I wanted to do was make something more subtle, and something that was very simple.” Fire Hazard takes place in the immediate aftermath of a blackout, and follows a young man as he attempts to deal with it. “It’s a strange meeting between people who don’t know each other,” is Sanderson’s pithy summary. And his chances of winning? “There are eight awards,” he said “so I won’t really be surprised if I win one.”
Fire Hazard, along with the 11 other contenders, can be seen and voted for at www.nsi-canada.com/filmexchange/nex or by actually mustering the gumption to physically drag your atrophied self to the Globe Theatre on Saturday, March 3.
NSI FilmExchange is in town from Feb. 28 to March 3. The full lineup can be perused at leisure by visiting www.nsi-canada.com/filmexchange.
