The Dead Ringer

“Ideas and inventions are a strange thing.” William H. Loewen’s dynamic support of the arts has translated into a blossoming of imaginative work in Manitoba and across the country. Bolstered by an all-Manitoba creative team, director Mike Maryniuk sets documentary against experimental animation and a unique musical score to explore what it means to nurture creativity and see it grow.

Starving for companionship, Quinn pursues an unorthodox approach to resolving her intense loneliness.

A murder has been committed on a balcony. But it is only one of the many balconies attached to a large apartment block. Strange things are transpiring of each of them on loop. As the eye attempts to take them all in, the murder soon seems entirely unimportant.

This deaf-and-dumb young man who is called ‘the Goose’ by his scoffing acquaintances makes the most psychedelic of journeys by fax machine. Like a goose leaving for the sun in the winter, this anti-hero is looking for somewhere else to find his own voice. Absurdist drama that makes eager use of stop-motion carpet figures, silent-film references, computer animation, video and arcade games.

A deceased filmmaker experiences a posthumous dream in which he attempts to reunite with his wife. (Homage to Italian film director Federico Fellini in the year of the centennial celebration of his birth.)

Working in sublime self-isolation during the strange pandemic spring of 2020, avant-garde filmmaker Mike Maryniuk composes a surreal ode to rebirth and reinvention. Juxtaposing archival imagery with handcrafted animation, he conjures up a shimmering utopian dreamscape, a post-COVID world shaped by the primordial forces of nature—haunted by the genial spectre of Buster Keaton.

An animated short film made with 6,490 photographs of spin art micro paintings.

A stop-motion film exploring the mechanisms and materiality of consumerism and recycling culture.

Hypnosis Highway. The effects of drinking magical ditch water near the Thompson Crystal Smelter. Shot and edited in a truck on the way to Lynn Lake, Manitoba, near Thompson. This is exactly how the passing trees look after 10 hours.

Temporary Tattoos applied to 35mm for eternity. An energetic conjuring of Manitoban spirits.

The camera’s roving eye seems to warp and bend a mysterious white room in this unsettling excerpt from a film Guy Maddin created for the opening of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox building.

A bizarre video collage created from the ashes of Winnipeg's local television broadcasts of decades past, detailing the rise and fall of the Winnipeg Jets.

After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie started making whimsical stringed instruments. His DIY inventiveness transformed lawn rakes, stop signs, and bent pitchforks into fully playable banjos, fiddles and violins.