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Why make movies in Winnipeg?

Broadcast Date: July 4, 1991

There's a quiet buzz in the Canadian film industry about the Winnipeg Film Group. Film festival audiences are enthralled by the co-op's output and the group's reputation is growing beyond Portage and Main. Probing the group's "subterranean desires and subversive visions," CBC reporter Paul McGrath has one nagging question: how did this prairie city spawn a film movement? "A lot of good minds have tried to crack that nut," says director John Paizs. "What I wonder is: why not everywhere else?"

Why make movies in Winnipeg?

• The CBC wasn't the only media outlet to notice the Winnipeg Film Group in the early 1990s. The magazine Cinema Canada called it "the best-kept film secret in Canada." Bronwyn Drainie, an arts columnist with the Globe and Mail, said: "In Toronto, filmmakers have no vision… That may be the backbone of the film industry in this country, but the soul will come from places like Winnipeg."

• CBC Radio also profiled the Winnipeg Film Group in 1991. Geoff Pevere of the program Prime Time interviewed Greg Klymkiw, Guy Maddin and John Paizs.
• In the interview, Pevere asked if it was important that the films were made in Winnipeg. "I don't think the films could have been made anywhere else," said Klymkiw. Paizs added: "Working out of Winnipeg distinguishes you from the rest. It seems interesting to people."

• In the fall of 1990 five of the co-op's shorts, grouped together as Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, toured 11 U.S. cities. The films, said a New York Post review, were "neither manic nor sharp-edged. Instead, they are warped in a sort of Canadian way. They are subtlety, almost politely weird."
• In 1993 the Centre Georges Pompidou, an art gallery and cinema in Paris, hosted a Canadian retrospective featuring the work of several WFG filmmakers.

• One of the Winnipeg Film Group's better-known films is a five-minute music video, seen briefly in this clip, called We're Talking Vulva (1990). In the film, a woman in a life-size foam-rubber vagina costume performs a rap song about the functions of female genitalia.
• Filmmakers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan made the video through the Winnipeg Film Group but were funded by the National Film Board for its compilation film Five Feminist Minutes.

• Not all Winnipeg filmmakers are members of the Winnipeg Film Group, but many have made their first films with the group before moving on.
• Aaron Kim Johnston (The Last Winter, For the Moment), John Paskievich (If Only I Were an Indian), Noam Gonick (Hey, Happy! , Stryker) and Sean Garrity (Inertia) are just a few filmmakers who have enjoyed critical or commercial success with films made outside the Winnipeg Film Group.

• More recently, Winnipeg has become popular as a production centre for American TV movies and big-budget studio films. Many of the local crew on these films gained experience as members of the Winnipeg Film Group.
• In the summer of 2003 Miramax's Shall We Dance?, starring Jennifer Lopez, Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon, was shot in Winnipeg. The city masqueraded as Chicago.

Why make movies in Winnipeg?

Medium: Television

Program: The Journal

Broadcast Date: July 4, 1991

Guest(s): Bruce Duggan, Shereen Jerrett, Guy Maddin, John Paizs, Geoff Pevere

Reporter: Paul McGrath

Duration: 15:35

Film credits: Cinephile, Ordnance Pictures, Winnipeg Film Group, Extra Large Productions

Last updated:
Jan. 19, 2011