Bumper crop of movies with Manitoba roots hits Toronto International Film Festival

The province of Manitoba is extraordinarily well represented this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Officially, the province lays claim to seven films at the festival, which opened Thursday: four features and three shorts, all with Manitoba connections. Never before in the 49-year history of the festival have so many Manitoba-made films been presented.

Bear in mind that there have been quite a few years when few or no local films have made the cut at TIFF. In fact, in the past, Manitoba producers have made an art of piggybacking films on to Toronto screens during the festival, without officially being part of TIFF.

These secret invasions include Guy Maddin's first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, which was rejected by TIFF programmers in 1988, but screened on the sly thanks to the machinations of producer Greg Klymkiw.

In 2019, producers Danny Schur and Jeff Peeler chose a similar tactic, staging the world premiere of Stand! (based on Schur and Rick Chafe's stage show Strike: The Musical) to a sellout performance at the Royal Theatre at the same time as the Joaquin Phoenix movie The Joker was premiering at Roy Thomson Hall.

Even this year, Winnipeg producer Kyle Irving of the production company Eagle Vision stole a bit of TIFF thunder by holding a premiere for the Manitoba-lensed Deaner '89 on Thursday — the same night the festival opened.

"We have a big premiere with a red carpet and we have the biggest after-party at the Toronto Film Festival," Irving said ahead of the film's premiere, even though the movie wasn't actually part of TIFF. Its official Sept. 6 opening date precluded the film playing as part of the festival, but he wasn't going to let that stop him.

"TIFF is one of the biggest [film] markets in the world, really," Irving said. "After Cannes, it's second. But it's the most important and the biggest festival in North America. Why not take advantage of that?"

The local films being officially screened at TIFF include:

Rumours: Guy Maddin, a seasoned TIFF vet, returns with co-directors (and brothers) Evan and Galen Johnson for this satiric take on an apocalyptic G7 conference with world leaders played by a star-studded cast including Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), Alicia Vikander (another Oscar-winner, for her role in The Danish Girl) and Roy Dupuis (who delivered an award-winning turn as retired general Roméo Dallaire in 2007's Shake Hands with the Devil).

Though filmed in Hungary, it is produced by local companies Buffalo Gal Pictures, Thin Stuff Productions (the Johnson brothers' company) and Maddin's company, Walking Down Broadway.

Universal Language: Matthew Rankin's shot-in-Winnipeg feature is a multilingual, absurdist portrait of a Winnipeg where the official languages are French and Persian.

It was acknowledged with the first Director's Fortnight Audience Award when it premiered at Cannes in May, and now stands as Canada's official entry to the Academy Awards in the category of best international feature film.

The Mother and the Bear: Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Johnny Ma wrote and directed this enchanting comedy-drama about a mother who flies in from Seoul to be with her daughter Sumi, rendered comatose after slipping on an icy Winnipeg street, and ends up meddling in Sumi's life via a dating app.

The film's list of production companies includes Thin Stuff Productions.

Aberdeen is a hard-hitting character study about a woman (a stellar performance by Gail Maurice of Night Raiders and Bones of Crows) on a journey to reclaim a life lost on the streets of Winnipeg. It was directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas and produced by Farpoint Pictures.

TIFF opens doors, Manitoba moviemakers say 

But it may be the short films that reflect the overall importance of the festival when it comes to the filmmakers themselves.

These include Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, delivering A Black Screen Too. The experimental short sees her return to the smaller, more intimate animated projects she made prior to making her TIFF feature debut, Ste. Anne, which was released during the height of COVID in 2021.

Four filmmakers at TIFF — Ian Bawa, Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco — made their debut at the festival in 2016 with Imitations, a bizarre and comic take on celebrity worship. This year, three of the four are returning with their own projects.

Bawa is presenting The Best, a sequel to his 2020 TIFF entry Strong Son, a short that featured his own father, Jagdeep Singh Bawa, giving advice to his bodybuilder son (played by Mandeep Sodhi).

The Best, shot after his father's death, sees Bawa's surrogate Sodhi attempting to navigate the death of his dad, first by trying unsuccessfully to deliver his eulogy, then with a more shocking attempt to assert his autonomy.

Bawa actually has a feature film in the works that encompasses the cycle of films he made after the death of his parents, which he ruefully refers to as his "Sad Dad series."

Making the feature was a direct result of winning a berth at TIFF with Strong Son, Bawa asserted.

"It got into TIFF and was on all these top 10 lists and got me a deal with producers to get a feature," Bawa said.

Mitrovic and Velasco, meanwhile, are back as co-directors of Serve the Country, in which Mitrovic also stars as a compulsive liar who attempts to raise money to purchase a tennis racquet by pretending to be a former soldier fallen on hard times.

Mitrovic, in a phone interview, says the value of having a film at TIFF can not be overstated.

"We had been making movies six years before we had our big break at TIFF," Mitrovic said. "It was hard to get a job. It was hard to get any exposure really. Nobody really knew who we were."

But getting the film into TIFF changed that, he said.

"You suddenly get into every film festival under the sun. I don't even know some of the festivals that it played in, because once you get in TIFF, you get into everything. Suddenly you're playing into 100 film festivals in the following year.

"I started getting a lot more offers for work in the film industry as well," said Mitrovic, currently planning film courses as an instructor at the University of Winnipeg.

"That was one of the greatest years of my life."

TIFF continues in Toronto until Sept. 15.