CECILIA: I’ve been researching the $225 Film Experiment workshop from 2002 led by Solomon Nagler and John Kapitany that introduced hand processing and process cinema to Winnipeg for the first time.
I wanted to get your sense of it and its legacy, because you emerged as an experimental filmmaker from this program, if I recall correctly. I think you took the workshop in the second or third year. Prior to that, you were connected to Video Pool, I think?
HEIDI: I think I took the 225 in its second year. Sol and John Kapitany were still the ones teaching that workshop. Sol had recently returned from the film farm and was keen to share some new techniques.
CECILIA: You emerged as a filmmaker around the same time as Victoria Prince and Nicole Shimonek. Did you go to university together?
HEIDI: Yes, we were at the University of Manitoba’s art school together. After that, I went on to take my Master’s. I was doing a lot of video work for that, and had a really strong desire to get off of my computer and do something with my hands.
I took a super-8 hand processing workshop led by Sol first, and he encouraged me to take the 16 mm workshop after that. I really liked the super-8 class. I thought my whole film had screwed up. I had tried to do an animation that didn’t work out, and so I just ended up shooting some cars on the way to the workshop darkroom day.
But, it was just an easy embrace of the mistakes and working with what I had. I transferred this footage myself then played with the footage by slowing down parts that were just shapes of lights that resembled bones.
The film I made, Why are you so sad? was exhibited at Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of the Supernovas show curated by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan.
It was through that process that I became more serious about making a film with more intention. And so I started using these processes to lead to my official first film, Isolating Landscapes. The film was a product of the 225 and incorporated found footage from a Saskatchewan priest that had been donated to the workshop.
CECILIA: That found footage resulted in a few films – there was your film Isolating Landscapes, Carole O’Brien’s Time Away and Mike Maryniuk’s Asleep at the Wheel.
HEIDI: After I did the 225 workshop, I told Sol that I wanted to apply for a grant to finish that film. I was planning on applying for a small grant with the Winnipeg Arts Council. I thought I could start there and work my way up to bigger grants in the future.
But Sol was adamant that I needed to start with the Canada Council right away. He read over the grant and gave me some good advice. And it was incredibly helpful at the time, because I got $20,000 to finish that 5-minute film. As a filmmaker who was starting out, that was incredible. It let me focus on that film for a full year.
Looking back on it, I do wish that I’d been able to get a proper transfer of the film. But I mastered it as best as I could, with what was available to me at the time.
CECILIA: That film did really well. I think it premiered at Rotterdam?
HEIDI: It screened at a lot of places, and still does. Rotterdam, Transmediale,Images, EMAF… And it’s still actively programmed even now.
CECILIA: A lot of the films that emerged from that workshop went really far, in a way that was really unusual for a Film Group workshop at the time. There were not a lot of working filmmakers that emerged from the group before the early 2000s.
And the local film system at the time – not just the Film Group, but also On Screen Manitoba and agencies like Manitoba Film and Music – didn’t really know what to do with all these experimental filmmakers that were emerging and the works they were releasing to international attention, because it was so outside of the model they were used to.
Prior to taking Sol’s workshops, you had been working through Video Pool, correct?
HEIDI: Yes. I got a part time job there working in their technical department. Nicole Shimonek was also working there at the same time as me. We were definitely on the receiving end of a lot of criticism for being women working in a technical area. These dudes would walk in and ask for the tech and then laugh thinking we were joking when we said we were the techs.
CECILIA: That was happening even at Video Pool?
HEIDI: These attitudes are everywhere in film, even today. I think it’s getting worse, actually. The last time I called out a dude for blatant sexual harassment in the workplace, he just blamed the culture and said I should expect it. This told me that he absolutely knew that it was wrong, but knew he could get away with it.
CECILIA: With the film workshops, you were interested in doing something more hands-on? Was it that you were in close proximity to people from the workshop, being across the hall, and gravitated to it that way? Certainly, the Film Group had a certain reputation at that time.
HEIDI: The perception of the Film Group was absolutely that it was a boys’ filmmaking club and you wouldn’t be taken seriously if you’re a woman entering there. And that was exactly what happened to me over the course of years.
At Video Pool, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan were on the board, and so there was a bit more room happening there for women and that was what had appealed to me at the time.
The cross-over to the Film Group was only because I wanted to learn hand processing and other analogue film experimentation, and that was the only place in town at the time.
Thinking about it now, I think these experimental filmmaking techniques are still very relevant today. Perhaps even more so when you consider how AI is affecting photography. There’s no way AI can predict these methods because when you play with light on emulsion in the darkroom there are just too many variables.
I think this is the reason why so many people are gravitating to it now since negatives don’t lie.
CECILIA: The Film Group’s history with experimental film has not been a continuous trajectory since the 225. There was a really active community there for about a decade, but the workshop eventually lost steam and then stopped being run after many years.
Many of the filmmakers who emerged from that workshop stopped working in film for whatever reason – people like Victoria Prince and Carole O’Brien – but there are also several filmmakers who are still working, but who no longer have a close ties to the Film Group.
It is always the case that older generations of filmmakers move on from the Film Group, but the departure of this particular generation seems to have left a void for experimental filmmaking there.
HEIDI: I’ve recently been teaching a colour hand processing class at the Film Group. It’s a 12-person class, and it’s sold-out twice now. That’s unusual, because there has been little interest in similar classes I was slated to teach there in the more recent past.
My ability to teach these kinds of workshops has its origins in what started with the 225 – not just what I learned from that workshop, but also the trajectory that I took following that workshop, that Sol had a conscious hand in.
Sol introduced me to the Film Farm and the people there, and obviously the Film Farm has also had a big influence on me as well.
If you look at the network of people that Sol connected me to, it was all the right people. Sol was sharing his networks to benefit the women filmmakers, which was unusual for a male filmmaker in Winnipeg.
I attended the farm twice and kept in conversations with the Film Farm crew later on in my career and have also helped me so much especially Phil Hoffman and Rob Butterworth.
CECILIA: And this workshop series you’re teaching now at the Film Group?
HEIDI: Well, there are ten women in this group. I think women are more inclined to join when they can tell the environment will be welcoming to them.
CECILIA: There’s something in experimental filmmaking practice that really lends itself to women. I personally think that’s one of the strongest legacies of the 225 to the Film Group – not just introducing experimental film, but also in facilitating a filmmaking approach that was more accessible and more interesting to a significant number of women. Especially if you consider what the Film Group domain was like in the thirty years leading up to the 225.
In the decade that immediately pre-dated the 225, there was Shereen Jerrett, Paula Kelly and Carole O’Brien. Though Carole, herself, describes the 225 as a pivotal point in her career.
HEIDI: You might be able to include Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan in that group.
CECILIA: I suppose I’ve always viewed them as more closely connected to Video Pool.
HEIDI: I know that We’re Talking Vulva and‘A Day in the Life of a Bull Dyke were shot on film, so they probably used some Film Group equipment, as a minimum. But I wasn’t around then, so I’m not sure how involved they were.
CECILIA: I’ve been interested in this quote from Matthew Rankin from 2007 about the 225. I haven’t spoken to Matthew about it more recently, so it is possible that he may have evolved his thinking in the twenty years since. But I’m interested in this quote because it highlights a very common misunderstanding about the era that is far from isolated to just this one quote:
“[Guy] Maddin’s love for the divine fuck-up has resonated deeply with Winnipeg filmmakers. In recent years, filmmakers John Kapitany and Solomon Nagler have led a veritable revolution in Winnipeg-style image degradation by introducing the WFG to the cheap and potentially disastrous methods of processing 16mm film by hand. This new-found zeal for images devastated by chemical atrocity could only be rooted in the influence of a filmmaker like Maddin.”
HEIDI: Rankin himself was influenced by Maddin and so Rankin is speaking more about himself than anybody else. It would be a stretch to assume that all filmmakers in Winnipeg feel an artistic connection to Maddin because a couple might.
I think it’s very well-known that the 225 emerged from the Film Farm. Sol has spoken widely about the motivation behind it. And well, the Film Film has absolutely no connection to Maddin or his aesthetics. Certainly, Maddin himself does not claim this.
Winnipeg centres male filmmakers, and so it’s not surprising that they don’t understand what has motivated the women, or the steps women have taken to develop themselves, or even what they’re doing at all.
Whenever the Film Group looks at its history, it’s always men who do the talking. They’re the ones who decide what gets to be included in these official histories. And a lot of those men don’t actually have a strong, first-hand understanding of the community, so what accurate insights are they going to offer?
CECILIA: That was exactly one of my motivations in taking on this project. From my perspective, the 225 was of seismic importance to the Film Group and the wider Winnipeg filmmaking community for a number of reasons. But yet, it’s been largely left out of the conversation. When it is brought into the conversation, it’s framed very incorrectly. A lot of things are missed.
Back to the Rankin quote, I think the 225 was the first significant reaction against that culture at the Film Group at the time. It was only influenced by what came before, in being a complete rejection of that. It was definitely an aesthetic reaction against scripted narrative crew-based filmmaking.
I don’t personally consider Guy Maddin to be an experimental filmmaker, though I do recognize that what one’s perspective is of “experimental” may depend on what your starting point for how you understand what filmmaking is.
HEIDI: If you’re speaking about Guy or Jeffrey Erbach, who was working around that time, or even Matthew Rankin himself – yes, they all work with scripts and crews and use a conventional filmmaking machinery. They use the IATSE model of how production functions. So when you consider this, it would be difficult to describe any of these filmmakers as experimental.
CECILIA: And it absolutely doesn’t take anything away from these filmmakers or their achievements to note that they are not experimental filmmakers. It’s more a point of clarification.
And so, from my perspective, experimental filmmaking emerged in Winnipeg specifically through the 225. The workshop not only introduced hand-processing, but also direct cinema and process cinema, which are all hallmarks of experimental filmmaking – a cinema where the filmmaker is involved at every level in the materiality and technicality of it.
But the workshop also became a facilitator for women filmmakers as well, and in numbers that had not been seen before in the organization.
In the thirty years before the 225, there had been maybe ten women filmmakers in total associated with the Film Group, if that. And that number includes the three or four women who emerged in the mid to late 1990s. Whereas the 225 facilitated a doubling of that level in just a couple of years. In its context, it was rather remarkable.
And I’m not talking about people who were just signing up for workshops. I’m talking about people who were finishing films and screening them on a national and international stage.
Even a filmmaker like Danishka Esterhazy references the 225 workshop as giving her initial traction in her career, despite quickly moving on to conventional approaches and obviously running with that in a very impressive way.
HEIDI: Danishka definitely is very successful, making a living off of writing and directing. She’s making the kind of films she wants to be making. But Danishka’s career took off after she left Winnipeg.
CECILIA: Yes, well there is a common thread that women do have to leave if they want expanded opportunities. On the experimental side of things, the Film Group gets automatic credit for a grouping of women who are actually more strongly connected to the Film Farm, which is obviously a completely different development system from Ontario that has no connection whatsoever to the Film Group.
But the 225 did become a bit of a back door for women to enter into the Film Group.
HEIDI: You can definitely see a clear connection between a bit of an opening to women at the Film Group and the 225.
For me, I wasn’t interested in pursuing the conventional way of working, with scripts and crews and actors. And it was the 225 that offered a new pathway that hadn’t been on offer before. I see experimenting in the darkroom as a way to paint with light. There’s so much to explore there.
And yes, to your point about why the impact of the 225 has failed to register in official Film Group histories – it’s exactly because the people recounting the Film Group’s history don’t actually know what that history is or bother to find out.
And I have to say, it’s hard to understand why it keeps happening. The omissions cause very real problems, especially for women filmmakers whose recognition happens outside of Winnipeg on an International level. If you look at the careers of the women experimental filmmakers from Winnipeg, they absolutely out-shine the men when considered as a whole. But the official histories still continue to erase the women.
CECILIA: One of the things about Winnipeg that might not be well understood outside of the city is that there are actually two experimental filmmaking communities here, one composed of men and the other of women. There is no connection or crossover relationship whatsoever between the women and the men.
Do you think this is a fair assessment of what’s going on here?
HEIDI: Yes, absolutely.
CECILIA: Do you think it can be bridged?
HEIDI: I think the divide is intentional on the part of the women. It would be a lot of labour to construct something more positive when there is so much working against us. It’s more important that we focus on our own filmmaking and support each other’s work. That’s all we have the energy for.
You can line up the women’s CVs against the men’s, and I think it’s absolutely fair to say that the women collectively have much more distinguished careers. And yet nobody here is talking about them. At all. That’s what we’re working against. This is why nobody knows what the women are doing.
CECILIA: I remember being at an equipment meeting during my time as executive director of the Film Group and a male filmmaker stopped me from speaking. He said his friend seated beside him had just screened at Ann Arbor and that I should cede the floor to him, because that screening clearly made him the most qualified person in the room to talk about analogue equipment.
When I asked him why my screenings at Ann Arbor didn’t count in his view, he told me he didn’t know that I’d ever screened there. I asked him why that was, but he just quickly moved on to some other reason to prevent me from speaking. There is one set of rules for men and another for the women
HEIDI: That story is so funny though.
CECILIA: It’s absurd really, but it’s the kind of conversations I used to experience daily while I was at the Film Group. It’s what you described before – that your skillset is discounted because you’re a woman.
HEIDI: We were talking about the Film Group’s reputation before. That reputation comes from somewhere, right?
CECILIA: That’s why the movement that was created surrounding the 225 really merits a lot more attention, in my opinion, because that moment was very un-filmgroupesque.
HEIDI: Well, being around during that time and being around women filmmakers who were doing great things with their films, like Victoria Prince and Carole O’Brien – well, it felt that there was more room in that moment.
Though, I also think the Film Group had to figure out how to make more room. They did things like make their funding juries more balanced, and this did allow for more films by women to be funded. They were very vocally being called out for being a boy’s club, and it was affecting them.
At the same time, you could also feel that they were opening up only begrudgingly, and so there were also limits to how much support you could get there as a woman. Such a high percentage of its membership has always been men, and this has an effect on the place. So ultimately, you could always feel that the place was not for you, despite efforts to be more open.
I think somebody like Sol was an exception to the rule. He had significant influence at the time and was willing to use that influence to help all filmmakers. But, even despite this, we were still hugely outnumbered then, and we’re still hugely outnumbered now.
Even when the organization’s staff and board agree there is the need for change, it’s still very difficult for the place to change because it’s such a male-dominated place. The entirety of the film world is very male-centred and the Film Group has never really figured out how to change this locally. This problem has affected it for years. There are initiatives here and there, but nothing sticks. Nobody knows how to change this and I think it’s getting worse.
And today, there’s no space to even talk about this. The women are around and working, but they’re all scattered in different directions.
CECILIA: There’s a lot of insularity within the Winnipeg film community. It’s a small community and after a while we’ve all had experiences that stack up on top of each other. And so, if you want to continue working, you do need to retreat to spaces that are safer for you.
And well, it’s not lost on me that it was a white man who had to be the one who put himself between the Film Group’s culture and the women who had been left on the outside, as a protective measure to create space that existed for at least a while.
In that environment renowned for its many big-headed personalities, Sol was more interested in looking out for the community than he was in riding the old Film Group ethos of grabbing personal attention for yourself however you could.
HEIDI: I get the impression that Sol is aware of his privilege. That, unto itself, is a far more advanced awareness than the majority of men I know working in film.
You can definitely see more examples of successful women filmmakers now, but they’re off in different directions. It’s very hard to get a full sense about what’s happening with the experimental women filmmakers in Winnipeg because they’re working fully independently. They’re not standing in the Film Group waiting for room to be made there.
And the women certainly don’t have time to save the community. Most barely have enough time to etch out a small corner for themselves. You should read Sarah Polley’s book Run to Danger. It gives a fascinating perspective. It really shows all the layers of this phenomenon.
The problem is very obvious, and yet there’s no effort being made to correct it. The 50th anniversary book erased so much. Whatever the motivation was in writing that book, the erasures only add to the problems that need to be overcome.
CECILIA: Looking back on what emerged from the 225 and the rise of experimental filmmaking that followed over the next decade, do you think there is a feminist legacy that remains?
Not necessarily within the Film Group itself perhaps, but within the larger independent film community? Sometimes the two are spoken about synonymously, when that’s not really an accurate framing.
HEIDI: When I look at why I entered that space, it was because I was interested in learning something new that I was genuinely interested in as an artist. It felt like the 225 opened up a door to something I’d been waiting to come along.
For me, video art had had its days and I was looking for something different. The approach that I learned through the 225 was like finding your language, and it felt natural to me, because it responded to how my brain worked. Instead of trying to jam my brain into the idea of conventional filmmaking, it was freeing to work with the medium directly and intuitively connect with the tactility of the film.
I already had the motivation, and taking that class gave me the technical skill set. And then I had enough of a base after that to just be able to come up with projects and start applying for more things. I was able to get enough screenings because of the work I did in that class.
CECILIA: The experimental filmmakers who emerged from the 225 and who are still working, are all very technically self-sufficient at this point. They have their own equipment and they are developing their skills within a national and international context now.
And because the Film Group doesn’t have darkrooms, there’s not really a lot of reason for them to hang around there anymore. And so what you see is that it is cycling back into a place for conventional forms. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working in conventional forms, of course – it’s just something different.
But you mentioned that you’re teaching a new experimental filmmaking workshop there now and that there’s more interest now than there’s been more recently?
HEIDI: There are ten women in the group, and so you can see that there is something here in experimental film approaches that continues to appeal to women.
It’s unusual because I teach workshops at the Film Group every now and then, and there’s never been a time in the more recent years when there was this kind of positive reception to these approaches. When you consider what’s happened in the last several years, this is a huge number. And one of my participants is 17-years-old.
CECILIA: Are your students coming from an interest in crew-based approaches, or are they from other areas entirely?
HEIDI: They’re mostly new people who don’t have a historic connection to the Film Group, and they’re also younger. There’s a past student from Freya Olafson’s video class at the U of M. Madison Thomas is also taking the workshop.
Madison has had incredible success in mainstream industry work, and so it’s great to see somebody like her taking the class. It’s great to see people who are working in different forms also take an interest in experimental approaches. She’s done very well in her career.
CECILIA: Do you think any of the students in your workshop will stick with it?
HEIDI: It’s hard to say, but there’s definitely a sense of excitement around the workshop that I haven’t seen in a while.
Moving from workshops to making a career out of it – a lot of people just can’t even imagine how that can happen. There’s a strategy to that and how to approach the arts councils. People can hold themselves back because this process is difficult and time-consuming, and some give up too quickly.
CECILIA: Speaking of Madison Thomas, I wanted to talk a bit about the lack of Indigenous filmmakers working in the experimental film space. When you think about a filmmaker like Rhayne Vermette, I think she’s more an exception to the rule.
The Film Group in the early 2000s had a handful of women filmmakers around, but there was not even one Indigenous filmmaker. The organization was a very socially-converative space that mirrored society at the time, considering what it was willing to make space for and what it wasn’t. Winnipeg and the entire prairie region have an extremely socially-conservative tradition. And the Film Group was definitely not a space ahead of its time or its context, that’s for sure.
Then you see the emergence of a filmmaker like Rhayne Vermette, who is exceptionally talented and definitely brought up her own career. But would she have even been comfortable to step foot into the Film Group in the era before the 225?
Certainly, Caroline Monnet’s emergence a few years prior definitely opened up a lot. Do you consider Rhayne to be a part of the 225 legacy?
HEIDI: Well, I don’t think Rhayne would be afraid to enter into any place. Whether she would have wanted to enter into the old Film Group, that’s something different.
She entered into filmmaking through the Mosaic project, and that program was only a couple of years old at the time. Caroline Monnet, having been the first participant of the Mosaic with her film IKWÉ, definitely changed perceptions of what was possible there.
I was Rhayne’s mentor for the Mosaic project. She had a very strong and clear idea of what she wanted to do, and so it was just about giving her the time and freedom to do work. But I honestly doubt a man would have let her do just her thing. They would have been questioning her and trying to tell her to change things just as an excuse to hang out with her.
So I agree that she entered into filmmaking using film-based approaches that were the legacy of the 225 and were not available at the Film Group prior to the 225. But at this point, she’s far surpassed those origins and obviously she’s now working in narrative approaches.
CECILIA: There is an argument to be made that the Mosaic project, which was a program that I created at the Film Group, could have been seen as a downstream legacy of the 225 because I emerged as part of the 225 movement.
But at the same time, the Mosaic emerged from the need to respond to the Canada Council for the Arts pressing down on the Film Group very hard to correct another historic inequity – that, as I mentioned, it had no Indigenous filmmakers connected to it at all at the time. This, in a city where Indigenous peoples make up close to 20% of the population. The funders were certainly knocking at my door about this problem from the very first day I started my tenure as executive director in 2006.
HEIDI: Caroline Monnet’s career is truly spectacular at this point. She’s branched out into so many areas, including fashion design. And yes, definitely, you can see connections there from the 225 and the things that branched out from the new way of thinking that the class brought in.
But I also have to say that when Rhayne came in, I had already started to feel that the Film Group environment had returned to being difficult again. Sol had left again by then. And so, I did give Rhayne fair warning about the environment. I wish somebody would have warned me when I first entered that space. I knew it had a certain reputation, but I hadn’t realized the full extent of it.
If you’re a woman filmmaker working in Winnipeg, you not only have the struggle of working in a field that is incredibly hard to begin with, but you also have all of these dudes constantly criticizing everything you do just because you’re a woman. And that’s on a good day, to be honest.
Considering Indigenous experimental filmmakers, though, Charlene Moore would be newer into the mix. And then there are some filmmakers who’ve emerged from the WNDX One Take Super-8 Event more recently, like Robyn Adams. Kristin Snowbird is another person who emerged from the Mosaic project, and she’s done several recent One Take films that are real standouts.
CECILIA: Yes, there is a definite through-line from the 225 to WNDX – and the One Take Super-8 Event, in specific. Though, of course, the One Take is not really about experimental filmmaking the way that the 225 was. It’s more of an open platform. But you do have to manage some of the basics of analogue film before your work can reach the screen, and of course that doesn’t always work out. There can be some hard lessons learned in the process.
I remember when Sol and I first brought the One Take to Winnipeg in 2006. It was still at the tail-end of the era of film as the industry standard, but the Film Group was hard-pressed even then to help with equipment because so little worked and it did not have any working film projectors at the time.
We started WNDX before I started working at the Film Group, and this was definitely a very revelatory experience for me. WNDX always rented its equipment and venues. We never asked for hand-outs. But the Film Group just didn’t have much capacity to help at the time. We had to get a projector shipped out to us at the last minute from a filmmaker in Regina or the show would not have gone on.
HEIDI: The One Take was initiated by Alex Rogalski, no? During my time co-directing WNDX, Kristiane Church ran the One Take for several years.
CECILIA: The One Take was indeed started in Regina by Alex Rogalski in 2000. In our initial vision discussions for WNDX, Sol strongly felt that including a local production incubator would be incredibly important for the festival. It was and still is very hard to get screened at film festivals, and we had been looking for ways to ensure wide local participation in the festival.
Involving the local community within the programming of the festival and not just as audience members was of great importance to us. A film production incubator lent itself in many ways to the 225 and Film Farm ethos, where you have a completed or nearly completed film at the end. And this way, the final screening could become part of the festival.
When I contacted Alex about creating a Winnipeg version of the One Take, he was more than happy to share the framework with us. Alex remained closely linked to the festival for some time after that, flying in to Winnipeg yearly for it for many years. He was also one of our first open call programmers, along with Laura Margita. The WNDX One Take program was so wildly successful from day one, that it may have single-handedly entrenched the festival’s permanency.
HEIDI: I definitely think the One Take is a great example of how to offer local filmmakers a chance to shoot on film and then get to share those works at a festival screening.
CECILIA: Back to the 225 – I do think that it has feminist legacy. I know that some male filmmakers also emerged from it, but male filmmakers emerging from the Film Group was not and is not a novel concept. The entire organization was set up to facilitate that.
And, of course, there was an immediate emergence of WNDX in the 225’s wake, as a kind of spin-off of the 225, as an expansion of the ideas underpinning it.
HEIDI: WNDX was started by you and Sol and Jaimz Asmundson, right?
CECILIA: It was started by me and Sol. And Carole O’Brien gave us permission to use her name as a member of the group, because we needed three people to apply for a group grant at the time.
Jaimz entered into the picture about a year after we’d gotten the grant to run the first festival. Jaimz and Deco Dawson went to Dave Barber at the Winnipeg Cinematheque for help to get an underground film festival off the ground. They’d already named it the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival and it was beyond the stage of initial discussions.
But Dave told them there was another similar movement already underway and suggested connecting with me. Dave didn’t think two similar initiatives could both thrive; he thought that even just one would have a hard time. And so Jaimz came into the fold after that. I’m not sure what happened with Deco after that, but he was not involved in WNDX.
For the first four years, the festival was mostly me pushing it forward logistically. Jaimz did program some things, but became more heavily involved in the fourth year, when I asked him to take on more of the festival production work.
After working with him for a few years to transition the festival over to him, I left WNDX a bit before I left the Film Group. It was all connected. It’s like you said: you can only work in a community that’s obviously hostile to you for so long. I was anxious to leave it all behind and find newer and better pastures. And I did find them.
But in the early days of WNDX when I was first involved, and to which I can speak directly about, there was Divya Mehra, Jenny Western and Jenny Bisch. And shortly after that Rhayne Vermette joined and she became its first artistic director. This structure was revolutionary for an arts organization in Winnipeg at the time.
Looking back at the early programming, it was definitely the product of any early group, but I still feel the process of emergence and growth that was undertaken was extremely important.
Even just the idea of just allowing women to program films was an extremely radical idea at its time. Something like that would never have been possible at the Film Group at the time and wasn’t possible for a very long time.
Even while I was executive director of the Film Group, there was impossible pressure to sustain its historic hegemony. I had to pick my battles carefully, because you can only change so much when the system is actively fighting you every step of the way.
HEIDI: The Film Group hired its first woman programmer only within the past couple of years.
CECILIA: How long that took definitely says a lot about the organization.
HEIDI: WNDX took a different pathway from the Film Group. Right from the get-go, it was making space for underserved communities, artists and genders. And I think it does a much better job than certainly most of the big festivals in the country.
WNDX is not a festival for women run by women. But, honestly, would that do women any favours? If WNDX had been designed that way, men would discount it.
CECILIA: Yes, WNDX is a bit radical for doing a certain kind of work without outwardly naming the thing that it’s doing. It’s always been about leveling the playing field. And at the time it started, Cinematheque and other festivals were not doing that.
HEIDI: Even after you left WNDX, I do think a lot of its activist culture remained. Jaimz Asmundson was more involved then, but at least he was willing to listen to women.
And Rhayne Vermette was doing artistic direction for the festival at the time, so she had a lot of sway there. And so I do think it was able to sustain that pathway. And I think that shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot definitely made the festival more Queer-friendly.
I don’t have specific numbers, but I think definitely in recent years, there’s certainly been a clear gender parity happening including programming roles.
CECILIA: Do you think that experimental filmmaking has a legacy in Winnipeg?
HEIDI: Yes, I do think so. When you go places, people are definitely aware of it.
CECILIA: Do you have any other thoughts about the 225? Was it successful in intervening in the Winnipeg film environment at the time?
HEIDI: Oh, definitely. For me, I was able to learn the skills that enabled me to move in and work in the space independently and go on from there. This was a way of working that I only knew about because of what I’d seen from Sol’s workshop. These weren’t approaches that I’d learned before, even though I’d studied film and fine arts in university.
The workshop provided me with a good foundation to just start working, but I also had a bunch of footage at the end of the workshop that I was able to use to start making my first film. And so, that workshop basically started my professional filmmaking career.
I was painfully shy at the time. So painfully shy. But Sol offered to read my grant proposal and I felt comfortable enough to show it to him. I don’t think that would have been possible with any of the other guys around at the time; but maybe to be more specific, I don’t think any of the other guys would have tried to help in anyways.
So at least the 225 was a comfortable space for women. And it was artistically challenging in a very good way. These are the very same skills that I try to teach students now, so it’s definitely had a lasting legacy. And practically speaking these skills give me income – whether I’m teaching a workshop or making a film.
And I will add that WNDX made more space for women in the wake of the 225 because you were one of its founders. And WNDX was small enough to be effective at what it was doing. The Film Group is too big and too rigid of an entity to be able to change its culture, whether you or others might have wanted to.
There needed to be something completely new to bring about change, because change wasn’t going to emerge from within the Film Group. WNDX is a much more flexible space, even though it has a very tiny budget, because it doesn’t have a large male membership with dated views.
And in terms of what WNDX does, even the act of cataloguing its programs and the new films that have come out is super meaningful. The way that WNDX talks about local experimental filmmaking and the way it takes those conversations out nationally and internationally might matter more than the actual screenings it holds. I know I’ve been programmed by other festivals due to the programmers looking at WNDX’s program and asking me for my films.
WNDX does give a historical reference point about what’s happening in experimental film culture here. You have to have a reference point, or else you have nothing – and WNDX does that well.
Ultimately, WNDX is able to offer somewhat of a counter-narrative to the Film Group about the local filmmaking community that was and continues to be really needed.