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

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