Universal Language

The Octopus Factor

A man confronts painful memories of a love affair now over. But he is perplexed by the appearance of a disgusting creature that he just can't get rid of. But can one really release oneself from the abominable things that haunt us?

Negativipeg

An examination of Rory Lepine, who sent Winnipeg into a frenzy when he beat local legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a 7-Eleven in 1985

Self-Portrait

Commissioned self-portrait of the artist as metaphysical remix of Abbas Kiarostami's "Close-Up" recorded on a cellphone.

Kubasa in a Glass: The Strange World of the Winnipeg Television Commercial (1975-1993)

A found footage video essay tracing Winnipeg's civic pathologies, aesthetic fabulations and exquisite strangeness through the prism of its own low-budget, lo-fi TV advertising produced between 1975 and 1992.

Kubasa in a Glass: The Fetishised Winnipeg TV Commercial 1976-1992

Originally released in 2006, Kubasa in a Glass presents a digitally warped reflection of Winnipeg’s brief and disposable self-image, as seen through local no-budget and public access television of the 1980s.

This House

Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.

Soft Like Me

On a secluded prairie farm, adolescent boys labor in wheat fields for a sexually predatory warden and his farmhands, who threaten to feed them to a voracious beast if they ever disobey. The newly arrived Linus instantly catches the warden's eye, and begins to receive secret visitations from a mysterious girl. The other boys tell Linus the legend of a special boy who fled the farm and became a glorious angel that will one day return to free them all. When Linus asks the girl if she is the angel, her answer is enigmatic. After the warden's favorite boy dies, Linus is poised to become the next victim. The girl reappears and promises to help him escape, but with hope comes punishment.

Before I Change My Mind

1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.

Mynarski Death Plummet

A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). Combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing letratone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.

The Twentieth Century

Toronto, Canada, 1899. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950) fervently believes that he is destined to become Prime Minister, but to do so he will first have to fight his personal obsessions and overcome the many obstacles he will encounter on his tortuous path to power.

The Tesla World Light

New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to J.P. Morgan, his onetime benefactor.

Mademoiselle Kenopsia

Set on carrying out her task with dedication, a woman is obsessed with watching over anonymous interiors and occupying them. Both a custodian of the premises and a ghostly presence, she becomes an echo of how we relate to time, solitude and the melancholy of forsaken spaces.

Laurentia

A young quebecer descends into alienation and depression.

Momo 3000

December 31, 1999. Quebec is a few hours from year 2000 and its potential bug. Trapped in a Montreal appartement, Momo needs only one thing to survive this nightmare: couscous.

So Long Pluto

In space, a charming little planet named Pluto dreams of joining the Solar System’s official dance troupe. With the help of her asteroid friend, Ceres, and her human discoverer, Clyde William Tombaugh, she will do everything she can to make it happen. In this children’s film, where humans and planets share the spotlight, viewers will accompany Pluto on her quest for fame, until the moment she must face her destiny.

Sinclair

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.

God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness

Pastor Dave responds to the unimaginable tragedy of having his church, located on the grounds of the local university, burned down.

Electric Dreams

Miles Harding buys a state-of-the-art computer that starts expressing conscious thought and emotion after an interaction with spilled champagne. Things begin getting out of hand when both Miles and Edgar, the computer, fall in love with beautiful neighbor Madeline Robistat.

Hard Truths

Pansy is a woman so full of rage that every interaction she has devolves into lashing out, whether at her utterly cowed husband and son, or random strangers who have the temerity to address her. In contrast, her younger sister Chantelle lives with her two vivacious daughters and plies a successful trade as a hairdresser, putting clients at their ease all day long. Yet beneath Pansy’s abrasive exterior are hints of a more fragile psyche, one motivated by fear and damaged by repressed pain.

Pola X

A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.

Nickel Boys

Chronicles the powerful friendship between two young Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.

Born in Flames

In near-future New York, ten years after the “social-democratic war of liberation,” diverse groups of women organize a feminist uprising as equality remains unfulfilled.