The $225 Film Experiment and Changing Film Paradigms in Winnipeg

The $225 Film Experiment and Changing Film Paradigms in Winnipeg:
A Conversation between Cecilia Araneda and Solomon Nagler

CECILIA: I wanted to start this off by considering a quote about the $225 Film Experiment workshop made by Matthew Rankin in 2007, in the essay The Winnipeg Image. I wanted to use this quote as a starting point for this conversation to get to a more accurate framing of the 225 and its legacy today: 

“[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.”

SOL: Well, I don’t agree with Matt here. I think that the 225 was actually a massive paradigm shift from what had come before it. That would be the most accurate framing. 

CECILIA: For me, the 225 was influenced by the Winnipeg Film Group aesthetic that immediately pre-dated it, only in that it was the first major reaction against it. The 225 was the first meaningful reaction against scripted, narrative, crew-based filmmaking that had reigned there for a very long time. 

One can debate whether a 1920s silent cinema aesthetic can be classified “experimental,” for sure, but this is this space from which Maddin emerged – he works with scripts and crews and actors. I think it would be very inaccurate to describe his methodology as process filmmaking, which was the very foundational underpinning of the 225. And, well, I definitely don’t think that a film being “weird” is enough to make it experimental.

From my perspective, the 225 introduced both experimental filmmaking to Winnipeg – if it is the case that for experimental filmmaking, the director has a conscious hand in the materiality of it – and true direct cinema. And both of these things are very separate from the Maddinesque tradition. 

The other important thing that it did – which has been widely ignored in all examinations of Winnipeg filmmaking – is that it facilitated the emergence of a meaningful cohort of women filmmakers to gain traction in their careers in a way that the Film Group had never been able to facilitate before the 225. In this regard, the 225 has a feminist legacy that I don’t think has ever been examined at all. 

SOL: There definitely was a specific paradigm to Winnipeg filmmaking prior to that that had a radical interiority nature to it – not to denigrate it, but just to describe accurately for what it was. It was an aesthetic that was very self-referential, and also very narrative and script-focused, using traditional film hierarchies and working processes that are very normalized in conventional filmmaking. There is nothing wrong with working this way, but it was how the Winnipeg Film Group emerged in the 1990s. 

Then, this tradition took a more transgressive shift with filmmakers like Gord Wilding and Jeff Erbach. Even Noam Gonick can be folded into this framing. They were making terrific films. Back to Matt’s quote – these were the true inheritors of the Guy Maddin aesthetic, not the alumni of the 225. They were the ones who responded to Maddin’s weirdness with even more weirdness. 

Some of those filmmakers whose emergence predates the 225 and who were influenced by Maddin did eventually take the workshop and did incorporate hand-processing into their work. For example, I recall that Noam Gonick took the workshop at some point. But the new experimental movement that emerged out of the 225 was not, itself, an aesthetic homage to 1920s silent cinema or to constructivism. That was not the underpinning of the 225, nor is it the underpinning of the Film Farm that inspired the 225. 

CECILIA: The Film Farm is rooted in Phil Hoffman’s idea of process cinema, and the technical elements of the workflow are in service of this. It is the filmmaker who is loading the camera and filming, and then hand processing and colouring the film – they are finding their film through this process, using intuition. And this is not at all how Guy works. 

This way of looking at filmmaking, artistically, is really the antithesis of the type of filmmaking that was uniformly moved forward by the Film Group for decades, until the 225. 

SOL: Even before I met Phil at the Film Farm in 2001, I knew I wanted to make experimental films. I didn’t know how to make films at the time, but I was using philosophy and poetry as my guide. But on meeting Phil and being mentored by him, I learned that there was a different way to make films than what was happening at the Film Group. 

The Film Farm offered a model of filmmaking that was very compassionate and process-based. It was very powerful and can be used to break down locked-in ways of looking at production and storytelling, which for all intents and purposes can be seen as conservative approaches. There is nothing wrong in working in a crew setting, but Phil presented something different that really spoke to me. And so I thought: Why can’t we do something like this in Winnipeg?

Obviously I’m gendered as a man, and I didn’t have the same life experiences as many of the women that I became colleagues with through the 225 – but even I could see that there was a certain aggressiveness to the Film Group at the time. As a young guy, I found it to be both crazy and interesting, but on the other side of that was also a certain hostility. 

I think the Film Group at the time had a lonely feeling about it. There was a lot of chest-thumping. The Film Group was in a new, exciting era, because people were getting a lot of attention for some really great work. I have a huge amount of respect for Jeff Erbach’s work, and I think he’s the unsung hero of Winnipeg transgressive filmmaking. I think he should be celebrated more, even if his films can be really hard to watch. But reflecting back on what the Winnipeg Film Group was at the time, it also offered a very myopic way of looking at filmmaking.

And of course, we cannot forget that across the hall there was Video Pool, which had somewhat of a mocking tone towards the Winnipeg Film Group at the time: “Look at all of these dudes making these very conservative films.” This was their perspective, and they weren’t wrong. Video Pool was where all the women and queer folks went to make work. The hallway separating the two organizations served as a visual metaphor for their divide at the time.

I think that with the 225, we attempted to break old rules and divides. We were talking not just about experimentation, but also about process-based approaches and sharing resources and ideas in a really compassionate and friendly way. We were able to leave some of the competitiveness of the old era behind and instead support each other. Process-based work depends on dialogue, and the form and content are so intertwined with your daily life. 

And so, I think that the 225 softened many of the edges to the Winnipeg Film Group. It presented other options to aspiring filmmakers. This is not to disparage Guy, but with the 225, the Winnipeg Film Group was able to expand from its myopic focus on Guy in a really meaningful and needed way. 

CECILIA: Yeah, I think Guy gets brought up a lot in ways that really have nothing to do with him. These are labels that others insist on putting onto Winnipeg filmmaking, while Guy himself is just focused on doing his own thing. I’ve never heard Guy refer to himself as the progenitor of experimental cinema in Winnipeg, or quite frankly of anything. 

SOL: I absolutely don’t think he would refer to himself in that way. I remember there were times when people would approach him about the experimental film movement triggered by the 225, and he would immediately send those people my way. He definitely was not out there trying to take ownership of this movement. I think he absolutely respected it, while also acknowledging its different roots. 

CECILIA: I was one of the participants of the first 225 workshop held in 2002. I’m trying to remember when I first learned about the workshop and why I signed up for it. I remember seeing a photocopied poster up on the bulletin board, but you also encouraged me to take it during a Winnipeg Film Group board meeting. 

SOL: Yeah, we were on the Film Group board together. That’s how we met.   

CECILIA: I recall you had just come back to Winnipeg. I didn’t know you before you left, but people around the organization described you as having just come back. 

SOL: Yes, that’s correct. I made a few films in Winnipeg between 1998 and 1999, and then I moved to Poland for a period of time. I came back because I got a grant to make a film. I think I came back in late 2000 or early 2001. And then I went to the Film Farm on my return. 

I remember coming back from the Farm to my decrepit apartment in the Roslyn in Osborne Village, really wanting to have the Film Farm environment and spirit here in Winnipeg. I remember feeling very depressed after leaving the Farm, because I had really found myself in that process. And that’s when I thought that we could activate something similar in Winnipeg. 

I also think the Film Group had its own pressures. People like Guy and Jeff were becoming so well known, that others were feeling an immense weight on their shoulders. There was a lot of competition about resources in the pressure to become the next big filmmaker from Winnipeg. People wanted to connect themselves in any way to this brilliant stratum of artists. 

CECILIA: I think Guy was already famous by then, but during that period was becoming even more famous. Winnipeg is a small city with not a lot of resources to sustain a filmmaking community compared to Toronto or Montreal. And so when you see a local filmmaker who has found a model that helped break them out into international fame, I could see how some people would be tempted to try to publicly connect themselves to that. But at the same time, I also feel that the Film Group also lost itself in that mentality at the time, in ways that were super detrimental to it.  

SOL: There was still great work being made. Winnipeg has always been a great incubator of wonderful filmmakers, but in the case of the Film Group, there was a lot of pressure there to grab onto Guy’s fame somehow, to the point where they put forward a culture that would foster only a certain type of film. And so a lot of us, with the 225, we said: Let’s make this a different kind of place. 

And it was so successful, that suddenly the home of highly controlled, scripted cinema immediately became known as a hotbed of experimental cinema, almost overnight. We are all surprised by how fast this shift happened. 

CECILIA: The participants of the first session included me, Danishka Esterhazy, Mike Maryniuk, Jenny Bisch, Allison Bile, Robert Pasternak and Rob Haacke. Was there anybody else…? Deco Dawson signed up and filmed something, but then dropped out right before the hand-processing stage over concerns over getting scratches on his film. He sent his film to the lab instead, and so didn’t attend any more of the sessions. I don’t think the process was a good fit for him.

SOL: To be honest, I was super happy that Deco signed up and participated as much as he could. He did end up finishing the film that he shot. It’s called Fever of the Western Nile. 

Ultimately, so many of the films from the early days of the 225 were exceptionally well received and played at many international festivals. It was the number of important filmmakers who came out of the 225 all at once that was new. Before, individual filmmakers came out in small trickles from the Film Group. 

The 225, over its first couple of years, saw a number of films play at major film festivals across the world, which was unprecedented at the time. No one had those expectations of this new workshop. We were just looking to find a new way of working.  

The Film Group itself was very open to the idea of the 225, even if they weren’t quite sure what it would lead to. I think the staff of the Film Group were open to paradigm shifts, but because they had only been working in one way for so long, I’m not sure they even knew how to bring in change. These ideas had to come from the outside. 

John Kapitany facilitated all the technical and photochemistry aspects, as he had a background in photography. He also mentored others in this work. John was super excited about the program for a couple of years, though eventually felt the need to distance himself from the environment. Despite this, his mentorship legacy remains. 

CECILIA: I also think it’s often overlooked just how much of a financial crisis the Film Group was throughout the mid to late 1990s. When the 225 rolled around, the organization had just started to recover from a period of catastrophic deficits and funding cuts. The organization needed to shrink itself in order to survive, and I can imagine that navigating conceptual expansion when you are focused on the basics of survival could have been a lot. When the 225 rolled around in 2002, it was only a couple of years out from that. 

SOL: Oh, I didn’t know that. What year did they get cut?

CECILIA: The Film Group’s 20th anniversary program went way over budget and caused a major deficit. The funders then cut the Film Group’s funding base because of the large deficit, as funders will do. 

The Film Group then started the process of recovering and hired Larry Desrochers as the organization’s first executive director (the organization had only had operations coordinators before Desrochers). Things were looking more hopeful for the first time in a while, as Larry was working at professionalizing the organization. But shortly after Larry started, the Manitoba Arts Council eliminated the Film Group completely as an operating client without prior notice, for its demographic hegemony and failure to diversify over the course of many years. I think this might have been around 1997 or 1998. 

SOL: Oh yeah, that’s starting to come back to me now… 

CECILIA: Larry definitely stabilized the Film Group to at least stop it from shutting down and to start the process of recovery. But he was not able to return it to what it had been, financially, before the cuts. The cut was like $100,000 in today’s dollars. A return was completely off the table at that time. The next executive director, Victor Enns, then spent basically his entire tenure at the Film Group trying to get the Film Group out of this financial problem. The 225 appeared right when the organization had started to try to re-emerge from that. 

SOL: Perhaps the 225, given its outcomes, played a role in saving the Film Group? 

CECILIA: There is a grain of truth to that, given the cohort of women who rose up as a direct result of the 225 and the impact of the changed environment that emerged at the Film Group. But the organization still had a lot of work to do on the equity and diversity file. There was not even one Indigenous filmmaker connected to the organization at the time, and creating an environment where Indigenous and racialized filmmakers felt welcome and safe would take much more work. 

Shortly after I became executive director in 2006, I had an experience somewhat similar to what Larry had experienced, but instead with the Canada Council. Thankfully, though, the Canada Council gave me time – something that had not been offered to Larry. 

When I started working at the Film Group, I knew there were major financial problems. The Cinematheque was bleeding money and a lot of things had to be quickly scaled back to avoid posting another major organizational deficit. The board was aware of this problem when I was hired, and asked me to act on it. Cinematheque’s financial problems at the time, of course, stemmed from those deficits and funding cuts of the 1990s. I personally don’t think the Cinematheque ever fully recovered from that. 

But then the Canada Council flew in to meet with me and told me that the Winnipeg Film Group would receive no more funding increases until it fixed equity and diversity – and specifically figured out how to include Indigenous filmmakers. They told me that if the Film Group did nothing other than only support Indigenous filmmakers from that day going forward, it would be seen as doing its work and would receive funding increases. I was told to re-budget and figure it out, and that if I did not respond quickly, cuts were coming.

Ultimately, I knew the Canada Council was right – most especially when you consider that something like 15% of Winnipeg’s population is made up of Indigenous people. But there was a divide the size of an ocean between what was in the Film Group’s collective psyche at the time and what the funders expected their money to be used for. The organization was in a deeply self-lauditory mindset in that exact same moment. 

The work of fixing the organization before the rigidity of its way of thinking did it in, became the collective work of the organization for the entirety of its fourth decade. I did feel that there was strong buy-in from a lot of people, but many of the traditional beneficiaries of the Film Group’s resources were absolutely not happy with culture change in the organization and made these feelings strongly known.

SOL: A filmmaker like Rhayne Vermette was definitely able to emerge from the Film Group only as a result of the paradigm shift that happened from the 225. I cannot imagine that she would have seen space for herself in the pre 225 environment. The 225 by then had created a growing body of work, some of which was pretty radical. There was a new way to see yourself within the Film Group that was not in the context of positioning yourself within the film industry. 

Of course, Rhayne had immense talent to start off with, but without what emerged from the 225, I cannot imagine she would have felt comfortable enough to even step foot into the place; or perhaps more specifically, would have wanted to enter into that space. 

I also think it’s important to position the emergence of WNDX within this discussion, as WNDX was a direct extension of conversations we had through the 225 process. And by the time Rhayne emerged, both you and Mike Maryniuk were into lengthy terms at the Film Group. Both of you had emerged directly out of the 225, as participants of the first workshop. 

Rhayne, herself, was part of the WNDX curatorial collective and served as WNDX’s programming director early in her career. 

CECILIA: I remember that you and I had a discussion about creating WNDX at the 225 workshop itself. I think it was the second edition. 

That is how Carole O’Brien got involved in WNDX, as she was physically present at the tinting and toning station when we were having our discussions. Carole was already an accomplished filmmaker who had also been involved in the Film Group for some time by then. Prior to the 225, however, she was focused on making short dramas and working in more conventional forms. After the 225, she had a significant aesthetic shift similar to the one I had as well, and the result was a period of her most acclaimed work. 

I definitely do see the 225 as an incredible milestone moment that was super unique in the context of the Film Group’s history, because of that cohort of women who emerged from the process. 

There were, of course, other women associated with the Film Group in the pre 225 days, but I can name maybe one or two handfuls who emerged in the 30 years prior to the 225, likely because they were working within a really hostile environment. And so the 225 by itself doubled the number of women who were gaining real traction in their careers in just a couple of years. 

Danishka Esterhazy, Heidi Phillips, Carole O’Brien, Jenny Bisch, Allison Bile, and myself have the 225 as a starting or re-starting point to our careers. Heidi’s Isolating Landscapes, which she made with footage through the workshop, was selected for Rotterdam. Danishka has noted publicly several times in the past that she made her first film through the 225, and its success gave her the early traction to pursue filmmaking as a career. There was also Victoria Prince.

I remember that Jenny Bisch’s The Arousing Adventures of Sailor Boy was outrageously successful. Right out of the gate, it was selected by Ann Arbor. It triggered a conversion in Michigan about state funding of the festival, as some politician there picked up on the film’s title and riffed wildly off of that. It was part of international conversations. 

And yes, Rhayne Vermette could be described as being present within the 225 family tree, or at least what emerged from it, but both her and Caroline Monnet were early recipients of the Mosaic project that I initiated at the Film Group. The Mosaic likely merits its own, separate examination, because it consciously had a framework where the participants did not have to integrate themselves into the Film Group’s structures in order to make work.

It might be because the women filmmakers who emerged through the 225 were not actively self-promoting themselves the way the men in the city are known to do, that the workshop and the works that resulted from it seemed to have slipped out of the conversation. In the Film Group’s recent 50th anniversary program, for example, there was no positioning of the 225 whatsoever. 

SOL: I think there were definitely noticeable omissions in that 50th anniversary program, to be honest. But I do think that the activism of the 225 extended into WNDX, and so perhaps it is exactly the case that WNDX is the entity that is the natural inheritor of the 225 legacy. WNDX has never officially been part of the Film Group domain. The movement broke away immediately and took a different path. 

If you think about how WNDX programmed from day one, it was not only trying to make room for what was emerging in that moment, but was also really trying to make room for what had been historically excluded. We got better at that over time. I feel that there can be a case made that WNDX is one of the more progressive film festivals in Canada, as an activist entity. And certainly in the smaller regions. 

CECILIA: The WNDX One Take Super 8 Event could also be seen as part of the 225 legacy. There was, and still remains, an expansive cohort of filmmakers who can directly link their emergence on the scene to it, much in the way that the 225 had in the years prior. There are a number of filmmakers who were able to immediately activate the One Take to surge forward in their careers. For example, Leslie Supnet’s sun, moon, stars, rain was created for an early WNDX One Take Super 8 Event, and then went on to screen at Rotterdam. 

You can even look at somebody like Danishka Esterhazy, who has developed a really enviable filmmaking career and who broke out quite quickly. She is an example of a filmmaker who didn’t need to ultimately pursue experimental filmmaking to still find some kind of anchoring in the 225. And you can draw a direct line from her to somebody like Ian Bawa, who more recently harnessed the One Take Super 8 Event in a similar way. His One Take film Strong Son got into TIFF a couple of years ago, and he’s used that traction as leverage to make his first feature film. Neither Danishka nor Ian are experimental filmmakers, but they have taken benefit from experimental programs in their careers. 

The One Take’s lengthy existence in Winnipeg also owes a credit to Mike Maryniuk’s desire to see it work in its early days, as he was facilitating the cameras and technical aspects of the program. And as you mentioned previously, Mike also participated in the first edition of the 225 in the time before he started working at the Film Group, and he also inherited the workshop from you and John Kapitany after the two of you had moved on. 

SOL: I think it also needs to be mentioned that the One Take was something we borrowed from Alex Rogalski. 

CECILIA: Yes – similar to how the idea for the 225 itself was borrowed from Phil Hoffman and the Film Farm. These very important movements within Winnipeg filmmaking were the result of bringing outside ideas into the city. They were not autogenic. 

SOL: WNDX became a lot of the things that we were craving at the time. For most of its history, women have been a dominant presence in the organization, and that was starting back 20 years ago. It now has a long history of participation at the highest levels by BIPOC and queer folks as well. That is very unusual for an organization in its context. 

I think the success of the 225 showed that there were filmmakers looking for safer and more inclusive spaces, and that exceptional films could come out of these environments. Before the 225, there was just one model of filmmaking that was seen as possible. That required, for the most part, needing to work with male-dominated technical experts and within a working culture that did not make a lot of people feel comfortable. There were really no other options before the 225. 

With the 225, filmmakers now had the tools to bypass systems that might not have been working for them. They could work more consistently and independently. An embodied first person way of making film that not only allowed for differences in gender, but also facilitated it. I think when differences are facilitated and encouraged, that’s when things start to become more equitable. 

Reflecting back on what the Film Group was before the 225, you definitely see that it was a very conservative entity. It’s definitely obvious that you could not make films in that era without integrating their patriarchal approaches into the process.

And so, yes, while I’ve never thought of it this way before, definitely the 225 didn’t just bring in hand processing and experimental filmmaking to the Film Group, but also freed people to bypass old systems of working that may not have been suitable for them. 

CECILIA: I know that there were efforts happening in the late 1990s. I recall the Film Group launched a women’s film festival, called Re:Visions, that I attended. It may have been the first Film Group program that I attended, where I felt permission to enter into the space, and so I will give it credit for that. But that quickly disappeared. It wasn’t integrated into the identity of the organization. After the 225, however, men and women were working equally within experimental filmmaking, and that was definitely something new in independent filmmaking in Winnipeg.  

But, yet, whenever the organization looks back at itself, it tends to revert back to its old lens. There was that 2015 article in the Globe and Mail about the Film Group’s 40th anniversary that mentioned six white male Winnipeg filmmakers, including yourself, and nobody else. That would have been about 20 years after the MAC cut. 

On a personal note, I find it super frustrating when people see my deeply personal films about Chilean exile and displacement and social justice, and then ask me how Guy has influenced me. And when I don’t offer a connection back to Guy, but instead talk about my actual influences, they no longer know what to do with me. And I know it’s not just me – I’ve seen this also happen to other Winnipeg filmmakers. This phenomenon has ritualistic characteristics at this point: “You’re a filmmaker from Winnipeg, so you must speak about Guy Maddin or you will not be permitted entry.”

And to be clear, this is absolutely not coming from Guy himself. It’s an institutional phenomenon that has a separate life of its own. The institution does not know how to talk about Winnipeg filmmaking without centering Guy in that conversation. The institution glitches out when presented with the unexpected variable that not all Winnipeg filmmakers, and that most especially not all Winnipeg experimental filmmakers, emerged from the influence of Maddin. When I talk about having been influenced by the likes of Patricio Guzmán and Phil Hoffman, the entire system short circuits.

SOL: Honestly, I think a lot of people are just lazy when they reflect on the Winnipeg Film Group or Winnipeg filmmaking. There’s not a lot of serious analysis going on. 

I do think the power of the 225 was that it fostered exactly an exploration of individuation, which was really distinct from the aesthetic uniformity pursued in the era before the 225. The idea of how your own personal cinema can be made within these unique processes that really depend on yourself and your commitment to the process. That is truly independent filmmaking. 

And ultimately, I do think that the community of filmmakers around the Film Group was ready for that, even if the larger community on the outside did not know what to make of it and might still not. 

Despite its many real problems, the Film Group has also always been full of potentiality. Winnipeg is such a creative city that it was inevitable that something would come up. The 225 also benefited from good timing. It was at the right place, at the right time. Winnipeg filmmakers were ready for it. 

As a result of the 225 and the many successful films that emerged from it, filmmakers were suddenly traveling more frequently to film festivals outside of the city. That wasn’t something that was really happening previously. Connections to the outside were limited before. And so the 225 enabled Winnipeg filmmaking to expand even more conceptually, to where it was no longer so uniformly self-referential and self-focused.  

At the same time, I do think that the emergence of WNDX responded to the things that we were all starved for at the Film Group. It was a way to extend what had been achieved with the 225. 

I remember that you had immediately gotten quite a bit of festival play with the film you made through the 225. You had started traveling to festivals, and returned wanting to bring that experience back to Winnipeg, which was similar to how I had felt after attending the Film Farm in 2001. It was the idea of expanding beyond ourselves artistically and building community. You were the one who brought up the idea of the festival, and there were a series of conversations that followed. 

CECILIA: Some asked me why we weren’t making WNDX a Film Group program. It was the default position in Winnipeg at the time that all film programming was the Film Group’s domain. It was the only way professional film programming could be done. I will add that this expectation was not coming from Dave Barber, the Film Group’s programmer at the time. 

Around the same time that I brought up the idea of initiating WNDX, I had just initiated a seven-day series of films at the Cinematheque commemorating the 30th anniversary of Chile’s coup d’état in a film festival framework. This was a personal initiative – I programmed it and fundraised for it, and then marketed it to a total sell-out. The Globe cinemas in Portage Place had opened the year prior in Portage Place and Cinematheque’s spectacular audience up until then had started to collapse. And so, because the screening series was a week-long sellout, it caught the attention of a lot of people. 

Ultimately, it was the experience of organizing this series that gave me the confidence to propose WNDX. I think some people automatically assumed that I would fold it into the Film Group in the same way I had done the Chile series. But for me, and all of us who were involved in WNDX’s conceptualization really, it was not just a screening series that we were looking to trigger. It was a much more expansive idea. It was – as you describe it – the emergence of a paradigm shift. 

The Film Group’s culture has always been affected by a very dramatic internal struggle for resources and attention. The Film Group’s founders described it as having a lot of loose canons and there being constant arguing. And I don’t think I’ve personally ever witnessed a period of time myself when these weren’t extremely accurate descriptions of the organization. 

SOL: I remember that you and I were both starved for a different sense of community. And definitely, there was a clear personality difference between the Film Group and WNDX as separate movements. And WNDX was interested in a conceptual expansion beyond Winnipeg, and that was not something in the Film Group’s consciousness.  

WNDX has been able to fill certain gaps that the Film Group could not. WNDX has always had an activist mindset. We were always interested in making room for the underrepresented and the overlooked, and that’s the key thing to remember. Why? Because experimental film should be the opportunity for overlooked voices to explore their unique visions outside of the hegemony of how film is usually made, which emerges from a very patriarchal, white and colonized way of thinking. 

So what WNDX was able to become was what the 225 workshop opened up. Experimental film, at its strongest, allows for radical change to emerge. 

And of course, WNDX was a first of its kind, as the first alternative film presenter in Winnipeg to give wide space to independent programming practices. The role of a cinematheque and a film festival are very different, as you know. In many ways, a festival would have been a better fit for the Film Group in that they are better suited to advance filmmakers’ careers, but the organization never developed that way. 

CECILIA: The Cinematheque was, of course, historically very important for Winnipeg filmmakers. But now you see an expanding cluster of small film festivals that emerged in Winnipeg in the footsteps of WNDX, and so you know there remain gaps still in need of being addressed. It will be interesting to see how this growing number of small film festivals might change the landscape going forward. 

SOL: The community really bought into WNDX, and I think that was what was most revelatory. The first edition of the festival was utterly unbelievable. Nobody anticipated that it would be so successful. 

CECILIA: Is WNDX the inheritor of the feminist legacy of the 225 then? Is that the conclusion we’ve come to here? Is this why the narrators of the Winnipeg Film Group’s history find it so difficult to accurately position the 225 with the emergence of a significant cohort of women filmmakers within the Film Group’s history? 

SOL: I still do think the 225 brought many things to the Film Group at a time when it really needed those things, even if its main legacy was larger expansion beyond it. 

We cannot underestimate the impact of a changed working culture. Even if the Film Group still has a tumultuous vibe, the 225 did change enough to permit filmmakers like Caroline Monnet and Rhayne Vermette to feel comfortable enough to even step foot into the space. I can’t imagine they would have wanted to enter into the Film Group in the environment before the 225.

When you and I started at the Film Group, it had a completely different spirit and perspective. It was really a rather aggressive space. Ultimately, that aggression didn’t kill us, but…  

You and Mike Maryniuk worked together at the Film Group for such a long time. During that time, the two of you were mostly on the same page about how to drive the Film Group’s production development programs. And you were both products of the 225 – you both participated in that very first edition of the 225 and both saw first hand how it was possible to achieve a paradigm shift within the organization through the 225 model. And you were both emerging as successful filmmakers at the very same time. And so, what you were able to collectively bring to the Winnipeg Film Group for so long should also be considered a legacy of the 225. 

Ok, I have to go into another meeting. Let’s return to this conversation later.