Winnipeg Film Group
A journey through 50 years of Winnipeg Film Group’s history, blending humor, poetry, and creativity.
You Are Here: 50 Years of the Winnipeg Film Group
Winnipeg moves slowly. The buses are late, the billboards are faded, and half-constructed new buildings wait patiently, tarps flapping, for workers’ attention. It is a city ensconced – in warmer months, the air seems to crackle with a hum of sustained energy and in winter the street lamp shine bounces between snow and cloud, creating a shelter of light. These adagio frequencies invite the mind to wander and have historically been a catalyst for the infamously irreverent art the city is known to breed. It is in this strange glowing cradle found on the bed of ancient Lake Agassiz that the Winnipeg Film Group (WFG) exists.
Left: The house on Adelaide St. in Winnipeg’s Exchange district which was home to the WFG offices in the early 80s
Right: Behind the scenes of WFG production Keltie’s Beard: A Woman’s Story (1983)
The WFG was formed in 1974 as a result of the Canadian Film Symposium held at the University of Manitoba, an annual event dedicated to the presentation and critical discussion of independent Canadian film and filmmaking. During the symposium, a group of several local filmmakers banded together to advocate for funding for independent cinematic arts. Their ask was spurred by the belief that the then-present system of film production, distribution, and exhibition worked to the disadvantage of the Canadian filmmaker. Their goal was to pool resources in a way that would benefit the making of independent films. The result was the founding of the WFG.
Over the years, the WFG has grown from a collective of filmmakers using the organizational model to produce films to a three-department artist-run education, production support, exhibition, and distribution centre committed to advancing the art of the moving image. The WFG is home to the Dave Barber Cinematheque, an arthouse theatre space which commonly screens films on 35mm, and the Black Lodge Studio, a microcinema and black box studio space. The WFG is also the proud steward of an Oxberry animation stand, an Archivist lasergraphics film scanner, and a temperature and humidity-controlled film vault for the storage of their distribution collection, which features a curated catalogue of 1100+ titles. Akin to many film and media arts organizations of its age, the WFG has become an “accidental archive”, maturing into a repository-of-sorts for films and ephemera that have found their way to the centre of the city and are in need of a collections status that is mobile and presentation-focused.
WFG film vault (2024)
The films selected for this program mark different eras in the organization’s history while offering tender records of the people and places that have made the WFG what it is today. All are grounded in the unscripted and share an approach to mediation that allows each subject to resonate beyond the boundaries of a screen. Each of the films encapsulates the mundane, the heartfelt, the scrappy, and the absurd natures of the city’s wandering minds, and provides a snapshot of the organization that works continuously to support them.
Jillian Groening
Distribution Director
Winnipeg Film Group
5 products
Main Street Soldier
Duration: 36 minutes
Subscription access
World War II veteran Ray LeClair relives his marches through a haze of alcoholism on Winnipeg's Historic Main Street. The film draws from Ray’s two battlefields: war and the street.
Le Métif enragé
Duration: 36 minutes
Subscription access
A film that reveals the vitality, colour, talent and fury in Western Canada’s oldest and largest French city: St. Boniface. In a devilish mood, local poet George Morrissette uses a hometown fiddle competition to recite a poem about Franco-Manitobans and the Métis French. The audience turns against him and we witness a dramatic confrontation.
You Laugh Like A Duck: Children Living in Manitoba and Nova Scotia
You Laugh Like A Duck: Children Living in Manitoba and Nova Scotia
New product!Duration: 56 minutes
Subscription access
_You Laugh Like a Duck_ follows the activities of young women on a Hutterite colony in Manitoba, Indigenous youth on reserves in both Manitoba and Nova Scotia, and urban, self-characterized "white, middle-class" teenagers in both Winnipeg and Halifax to demonstrate the diversity of their life experiences.
Cattle Call
Duration: 8 minutes
Subscription access
_Cattle Call_ is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques, filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have tried to create images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctio...
Dog Stories
Duration: 50 minutes
Subscription access
_Dog Stories_ reveals as much about the people telling the stories as the dogs they are describing. The dog owners are more honest about their feelings about a dog than almost any other aspect of their lives, and in the process they reveal a lot about themselves.
Main Street Soldier
Duration: 36 minutes
Subscription access
World War II veteran Ray LeClair relives his marches through a haze of alcoholism on Winnipeg's Historic Main Street. The film draws from Ray’s two battlefields: war and the street.
Le Métif enragé
Duration: 36 minutes
Subscription access
A film that reveals the vitality, colour, talent and fury in Western Canada’s oldest and largest French city: St. Boniface. In a devilish mood, local poet George Morrissette uses a hometown fiddle competition to recite a poem about Franco-Manitobans and the Métis French. The audience turns against him and we witness a dramatic confrontation.
You Laugh Like A Duck: Children Living in Manitoba and Nova Scotia
You Laugh Like A Duck: Children Living in Manitoba and Nova Scotia
New product!Duration: 56 minutes
Subscription access
_You Laugh Like a Duck_ follows the activities of young women on a Hutterite colony in Manitoba, Indigenous youth on reserves in both Manitoba and Nova Scotia, and urban, self-characterized "white, middle-class" teenagers in both Winnipeg and Halifax to demonstrate the diversity of their life experiences.
Cattle Call
Duration: 8 minutes
Subscription access
_Cattle Call_ is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques, filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have tried to create images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctio...
Dog Stories
Duration: 50 minutes
Subscription access
_Dog Stories_ reveals as much about the people telling the stories as the dogs they are describing. The dog owners are more honest about their feelings about a dog than almost any other aspect of their lives, and in the process they reveal a lot about themselves.
