What does cinema tell us about a place? Winnipeg filmmaker Rhayne Vermette (Métis) reveals diverse histories through a screening of films that center the artist’s community, collaborators, and emerging voices of her home region. Vermette emphasizes these artists’ connections through stories from the land, playfulness, isolation, the tactility of imperfect images, and eccentric humor, thus uniting distinct creative visions that inspire and expand upon her own work.
Organized on the occasion of Vermette’s films entering the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection, this screening is presented in conjunction with the exhibition This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection, where her film Extraits d’une Famille (Excerpts of a Family) is on view. The program will be followed by a conversation with Vermette and Irene Bindi, co-editor of Exovede in the Darkroom: The Films of Rhayne Vermette, the first collection of writing celebrating the filmmaker’s work.
Program
Rhayne Vermette, Domus, 2017, 16mm, 15 min.
Rhayne Vermette, Black Rectangle, 2014, 16mm, 1 min.
Rhayne Vermette, Tricks Are for Kiddo, 2012, 16mm, 2 min.
Ed Ackerman, Two Taa Too, 1992, 35mm, 5 min. Courtesy Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
Mike Maryniuk, Tattoo Step, 2008, 35mm, 1 min. Courtesy Winnipeg Film Group.
OMÏD, Desk Study, 2024, digital, 1 min.
Divya Mehra, Allow Suffering to Speak (I’m too sad to tell you), 2016, Super 8 transferred to digital, 3 min.
Ekene Emeka Maduka, Spirits of Abstruse Lizards, 2023, digital, 8 min. Courtesy Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
Darryl Nepinak and Clint Enns, I for NDN, 2011, digital, 2 min. Courtesy Winnipeg Film Group.
Rachel Beaulieu, Children of the Stars, 2023, Super 8 transferred to digital, 4 min.
Charlene Moore, Nipi, 2023, Super 8 transferred to digital, 3 min.
Heidi Phillips, Isolating Landscapes, 2007, digital, 5 min. Courtesy Video Pool Media Arts Centre.
Leslie Supnet, The Peak Experience, 2018, digital, 8 min. Courtesy Winnipeg Film Group.
Program length: 58 min.
Bios
Irene Bindi is a Winnipeg-based artist and editor. She has presented visual and sound work at galleries, festivals, and venues in Canada, the US, Ireland, and Italy. Her writing on art and politics has appeared in publications including Briarpatch, Blackflash, Canadian Art, the People’s Voice, and Public Parking. She is a former 35mm film projectionist, holds a master’s degree in film from York University, and has programmed films both independently and as part of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image’s programming collective. In 2023 she brought the 1973 Italian children’s antiwar film La Torta in Cielo (Cake in the Sky) to North America for the first time with a screening at the Winnipeg Film Group’s Dave Barber Cinematheque. She is co-editor with Stephen Broomer of Exovede in the Darkroom: The Films of Rhayne Vermette, and is currently developing a book about the idiosyncratic films of Italian socialist filmmaker Cecilia Mangini.
Rhayne Vermette (Métis) was born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba. While studying architecture at the University of Manitoba, she fell into the practices of image making. Primarily self-taught, she makes work that emphasizes an interruption of image through collage, photography, and analog filmmaking. Themes of place, time, and rhythm are expressed through opulent layers of fiction, animation, reenactments, and divine interruption. Her works and films have exhibited internationally at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, New York Film Festival, the Remai Modern, Jeonju International Film Festival, Valdivia International Film Festival, DocumentaMadrid, Platform Center for Photographic and Digital Arts, and Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective. Her first feature narrative, Ste. Anne (2021), was critically acclaimed and recognized, most notably by TIFF’s Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Ed Ackerman is an animator who explores cinematic language using the materials he finds close at hand: plasticine, photocopiers, 5-year-old children let loose in a village with disposable cameras, and, most famously, typewriters. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and after a year at Toronto Metropolitan University’s film school, returned home and made two collaborative films with Greg Zbitnew: Five Cents a Copy and Sarah’s Dream. He has since lived in Montreal, Toronto, and rural Ontario. He went on to make films for Sesame Street, IMAX, the National Film Board of Canada, the CBC, and public service announcements for US television featuring “Smokey the Bear.” Ackerman’s film Primiti Too Taa, made in collaboration with Colin Morton, is a three-minute nonsense sound poem based on the writing of Kurt Schwitters. It has been shown across Canada and around the world at festivals, cinematheques, and galleries, and won numerous awards.
Rachel Beaulieu is an Anishinaabe writer, director, and producer from Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation in Manitoba, Canada. Her work is influenced by her unique perspective as a First Nations woman and aims to make space for creators with a diverse vision. She is Assistant Director for the Winnipeg Indigenous Filmmakers Collective, which provides monthly meeting events and training opportunities to Indigenous participants. She has more than 14 years of experience as a multimedia professional. Beaulieu’s audio and video production work has aired on CBC, CTV, FOX, Al Jazeera, NBC, APTN, SHAW TV, Bell MTS, and her narrative and documentary films have shown in international film festivals such as the American Indian Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, WNDX Festival of Moving Image’s, LA Skins Fest, and the Gimli International Film Festival.
Ekene Emeka Maduka is an artist who creates thought-provoking pictorial tableaux with oil paints. Her paintings are known for their dynamic compositions and intricate details, which depict various mental states and emotional complexities. She is currently based in Treaty 1 and has gallery representation at Fabienne Levy Art Gallery, Switzerland.
Clint Enns is an artist, curator, and writer based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal.
Mike Maryniuk was born in Winnipeg but raised in the rural back country of Manitoba. A completely self-taught film virtuoso, Maryniuk has created a film world that is an inventive hybrid of Jim Henson, Norman McLaren, and Stan Brakhage. Maryniuk’s films are a visual stew of handmade ingredients and are full of home-cooked wonderfulness.
Divya Mehra (b. 1981, Winnipeg, Manitoba) is known for her meticulous attention to the interaction of form, medium, and site. Her works are a reminder of the complex realities of displacement, loss, and oppression. Mehra’s work has been exhibited, screened, and commissioned by Frieze Sculpture, Los Angeles; Creative Time, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Queens Museum of Art, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams; CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Nuit Blanche and the City of Toronto, Toronto; and the Embassy of Canada in Washington, DC. She has been featured in prominent publications such as the New York Times, Times of India, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post. Mehra’s work is in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa; and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina. She has been honored with various grants and awards, including the 2022 Sobey Art Award. In 2024 she will present a solo exhibition at Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Mehra lives and works in Seattle.
Winnipeg filmmaker and member of York Factory First Nation, Charlene Raven Moore is an award-winning writer, director, and producer living in Treaty One Territory. Moore has traveled internationally working and filming in places such as the backcountry of Banff, Alberta, for the 2024 documentary Singing Back the Buffalo and documenting the Residential School Survivors Delegation at the Vatican in 2022. As a queer Cree, Saulteaux, and Welsh woman, Moore creates films that focus on identity, connection, and resilience. She has written, directed, and produced several short films that have been nationally broadcasted and have played internationally at film festivals such as Slamdance, the Vancouver International Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, ImagineNative Film Festival, LA Skins Film Festival, and BIRRARANGGA Film Festival. Moore holds a Master’s in Indigenous Governance and has volunteered as a board member of the Indigenous Filmmakers Association since its inception. She was a co-organizer of the Winnipeg Indigenous Filmmakers Collective from 2014 to 2022.
Darryl Nepinak, from Skownan First Nation, was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Zwei Indianer Aus Winnipeg, a short film commissioned by the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, was selected for the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival. After making 15 short films, Nepinak took a break from filmmaking to work with people with addictions in his community. He is returning to filmmaking and currently is writing “The Band Office,” a pilot for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and is directing 10 short films with the National Film Board of Canada.
OMÏD is a Manitoba-born visual artist, curator, and farmer.
Heidi Phillips is an experimental filmmaker and installation artist from Manitoba, Canada, with an affinity for the tactility of the filmic medium. Phillips often uses thrifted Super 8 films, contact printing, and darkroom experiments to push her work into new places. Phillips’s old-school process frequently becomes part of the content, as grainy scratched films are merged with images lifted from found footage to create mesmerizing, transcendent works. Her films have screened around the world at galleries and festivals such as the Power Plant in Toronto and Transmiedale in Berlin. She is also the recipient of the 2011 Manitoba Film Hothouse Award and was honored at Cinematheque with a retrospective of her work.
Leslie Supnet is a moving image artist who utilizes animation, found media, and experimental practices on film and video. Her work has shown internationally at film festivals, galleries, and microcinemas, including TIFF (Short Cuts Canada), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Melbourne International Animation Festival, Experimenta India, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, WNDX, Edge of Frame/Animate Projects, and many others. She has been commissioned by Reel Asian, Pleasure Dome / Art Spin, the8fest, Cineworks, and Film Pop! (Pop Montreal). Supnet has an MFA from York University and teaches analog and digital animation at various artist-run centers, not-for-profits, and for the Faculty of Art and Continuing Studies at OCAD University.
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