Film festival screenings are important for the development of filmmakers’ careers, especially in the early stages – and yet, they can also be incredibly difficult to break into. Our panelists will provide insights into how festival programmers make selections and offer strategies filmmakers can incorporate into a film festival marketing plan to maximize their distribution efforts and budgets.
An event conceived of in Saskatchewan in 2000 by Alexander Rogalski, WNDX launched the Winnipeg edition of the One Take Super 8 Event in 2006 during our first festival and it instantly became a favourite event among local filmmakers. Through this program, 20 Manitoba filmmakers are given a cartridge of Super 8 film and they shoot in one take, with no cuts or splices.
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialogue between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X of periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the USA, invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures. Eastern Anthems is a road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings of history, the power of nature and rebirth.
Jaimz Asmundson (1981-2024), the filmmaker, was unexpected. Named “Winnipeg’s enfant terrible of transgressive cinema” by Victoria’s legendary Antimatter Festival for his commitment to works that were campy and subversive, the artist and filmmaker also built a practice centred on mediating personal relationships.
The Canadian prairie landscape is like no other; land’s end seems visible before you, and yet remains perpetually unreachable. This illusion is created by the curvature of the Earth, laid bare by the flatness of the prairie terrain. Sifting through two decades of WNDX prairie cinema programming to assemble this program became a similar experience – every time I neared what I thought was a certain end point, the pathway extended before me.
Something is calling you,
something old
from a very long time ago
In Caroline Monnet’s groundbreaking 2009 short film IKWÉ, these words are spoken in Cree over images of gently rolling, lapping water. The scene is crystallizing like the best moments in film should be — moments that call us beyond time whether during the first viewing or a rewatch decades later. For the WNDX Festival of Moving Image’s 20th anniversary, this program celebrates work by Indigenous filmmakers from the prairies that have screened at some point over the festival’s past twenty years. These films call to us from not so very long ago to revisit what has passed but also to imagine what lies beyond into the future of Indigenous filmmaking.