At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.
While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Einar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.
On a secluded prairie farm, adolescent boys labor in wheat fields for a sexually predatory warden and his farmhands, who threaten to feed them to a voracious beast if they ever disobey. The newly arrived Linus instantly catches the warden's eye, and begins to receive secret visitations from a mysterious girl. The other boys tell Linus the legend of a special boy who fled the farm and became a glorious angel that will one day return to free them all. When Linus asks the girl if she is the angel, her answer is enigmatic. After the warden's favorite boy dies, Linus is poised to become the next victim. The girl reappears and promises to help him escape, but with hope comes punishment.
Good Citizen: Betty Baker is a tongue-in-cheek mystery, full of unexpected twists. It features Betty, a civic-minded housewife who inhabits a cartoonish, 2-D, 1950s-inspired world, replete with narrow-minded peril. The story begins when Prince Philip goes missing and Betty finds a clue that leads her on a thrilling chase from her neighbour’s trash, to a strangely exciting all-girls bar, to the local chapter of 100% Women. Accompanied by the musical stylings of Marilyn Lerner, this frolicking satire irreverently unravels right-wing family values.
A family displaced by greed searches for a new home in a foreign place. As they explore they discover pieces of themselves; old and new. "Shea" celebrates what has always remained in Black/African peoples, an innate sense of home, luxury and interconnectedness.
The Sculptor sculpts The Stone into the world’s first Patavision. The Paravision only plays commercials.
The first production released by the Winnipeg Film Group! A restaurant serves cute little bunny rabbits. Yum-yum! One of the Film Group's greatest ventures, this light comedy features Peter Paul Van Camp as an industrious writer who sits and composes his poem about bunnies while at the very next table, the special entree - rabbit pie - seems to have become more rabbit like.
Two paranoid brothers are consumed with murderous fantasies after a horse convinces them that they are each others’ enemies. Starring Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Forbidden Room) and Milos Mitrovic (Tapeworm, Stump the Guesser).
Starving for companionship, Quinn pursues an unorthodox approach to resolving her intense loneliness.
A lonely nurse develops an unexpected passion for her unconscious patient in a 1930s tuberculosis sanatorium.
Winnipeg Film Group. Deep in the winter of 1986. Guy Maddin is in the process of filming Tales from the Gimli Hospital and needs to rub a dead seagull on somebody's chest. Immediately, Dave Barber agrees, submitting his bare flesh to Maddin's road kill and to film history. (This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque for its 25th anniversary, Silverscope)
Doubting details of her mother’s deathbed story, a skeptical daughter drags her brother on a genealogical goose chase through the Canadian prairies to the remote Icelandic highland. Determined to prove her mother spun tall tales, Erika delves into a basement full of file boxes only to find that family history triggers her own obsessive curiosity. Holed up with stacks of diaries, letters and pictures, Erika becomes spellbound by her increasing sense of belonging to an unfolding story.
A portrait of the filmmaker’s brother-in-law Steve Jackson with psychedelic photograph animation synchronized to music performed by Chuck Aliamo.
Christmas Eve, Brandon, a bottle or two of Tia Maria and the warm smile and demeanour of poet and actor Randy Woods as he tells of their combined intoxicating effects.
A co-production between the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative and the Winnipeg Film Group, this documentary shows children and youth speaking frankly about their home communities in Manitoba and Nova Scotia.
Using found footage of road trips from the 60's, Maryniuk has crafted a psychedelic tribute piece to a friend who passed away in a car accident. Maryniuk's techniques included hole punching and reassembling, bleaching, painting, scratch animation and boiling the film.
A group of infants with electric guitars compose a shocking violent punk rock song which surprises, saddens and offends their mothers.
The world's first experimental photocopy animated film explores some of the possibilities for producing images in motion, including all effects, fades, and dissolves. Each image was recorded on paper using a Minolta EP-310 photocopy machine.
