Streetcars and sandwiches From general strike to Fred Penner, Gimli Film Festival puts spotlight on Winnipeg By: Randall King  Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Jul. 20, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2020 (1523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The problem with most film festivals is that they offer too much of a good thing.

This is even true of the Gimli Film Festival, forced to go online this week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a livestream press conference a couple of weeks ago, festival director Aaron Zeghers promised the 20th anniversary fest would be “the most comprehensive online film festival ever offered in Canada… over 180 films screened in six days.”

Buying a $70 festival pass unlocks 20 films or shorts programs in the online festival, which begins Wednesday. That’s still a lot of movies.

So here’s a quick guide to available GFF films with a local angle:

 

6 Tons of Steel

The tilted streetcar installation in front of the Pantages Theatre on Main Street is a commemoration of the 1919 General Strike, observing the moment when worker anger reached a fever pitch and saw strikers roll over a streetcar.

It is a perversely admirable piece when you look at it in the context of the current moment. It’s a tribute to what the political establishment, then and now, would consider an act of vandalism.

Erika MacPherson’s 44-minute documentary examines the creation of the piece with an emphasis not on the artists who dreamed of it, but the blue-collar labourers who put it together, including an Indigenous apprentice ironworker who serves as something of a guide to the project.

It’s an inspired approach take that connects the 21st-century workers to their early 20th-century brethren.

 

---

 

Take Good Care of Each Other

Another 44-minute doc, this one by filmmaker Aaron Floresco, examines the life and legacy of Fred Penner, the Winnipeg entertainer who has been enthralling kid audiences for four decades, encompassing his longtime stint as the host of Fred Penner’s Place on CBC.

The film touches base with Penner, many of his collaborators, as well as the adult fans who are helping sustain his extraordinary career.

 

---

 

Tapeworm

Filmmakers Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco portray Winnipeg as a depression capital in this dark comedy that bounces among lost characters including a hypochondriac (Adam Brooks), a failed comedian (Alex Ateah), a loner (Mitrovic) and two stoners (Stephanie Berrington and Sam Singer).

“The situations and the emotions on display are unsettlingly and disturbingly truthful and rooted in an existential dread that any millennial can likely relate to,” wrote Free Press critic Frances Koncan in her four-star rave of the film. “We’re sort of a generation plagued by emotional tapeworms, after all, desperately trying to find our way after the promise of being a special snowflake went unfulfilled.”

 

---

 

El Toro

Filmmaker Danielle Sturk pays tribute to her own grandparents’ business, a family-run truck-stop diner in 1960s-era Saint-Boniface.

Sturk eschews conventional talking-head documentary style in favour of animation and stop motion in creating the colourful milieu of the DeGagné family business, incorporating illustrations by Diana Thorneycroft and charming models by Peter Graham and Janelle Tougas.

 

---

 

The Twentieth Century

Yes, it was shot in Montreal by former Winnipegger Matthew Rankin. But a Winnipeg attitude and esthetic pervade this gorgeous goof, telling the story of an ambitious young politician named Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) at the close of the 19th century.

And in fact, Winnipeg has something of a cameo appearance when King visits the city, depicted as a garbage-strewn hellhole populated by debased boot fetishists.

 

---

 

Almost Almost Famous

The late Winnipeg documentarian Barry Lank left us with this feature-length documentary examining the strange world of tribute artists, people who impersonate the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and Jackie Wilson.

Lank takes a close look at the tension that exists between the performer and his subject, which requires they tamp down their own unique talents in a never-ending offering to the memory of dead recording artists (excluding the still-living Jerry Lee, of course).

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing