If you hear Zimbabwe filmmaker Gertrude Hambira’s story of death threats, going into hiding and fleeing for one’s life, you might assume that she was a Hollywood director playing with conventional plot devises.

But in reality, this has been the documentary filmmaker’s life for the past two years as she has been wanted dead or alive by the Zimbabwean government. Luckily, this is a story with a happy ending, as Hambira and her entire family have now successfully immigrated into Canada, and are sharing their first Christmas together in years in Winnipeg’s Charleswood neighbourhood.

The story begins in 2009, when Hambira decided to produce the documentary House of Justice, exposing the brutally violent land reform tactics led by President Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwean government. She was then serving as the first female to be elected secretary general of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe.

The half-hour documentary is a stunning first hand account of the cruel and completely unethical behaviour of the Mugabe government in repossessing land from mainly white land owners and giving it to government ministers and supporters. Many of these farmers and employees, both black and white, were beaten mercilessly, shot at and in many cases murdered.

The film also exposes the Southern African Development Community – a kind of supreme court for the region – as a kangaroo court where many of the evicted farmers have been tried without legal representation nor the ability to bring forward their own witnesses.

Hambira held a screening of the film for government officials, hoping that the sobering images would help sway their opinion and actions on Zimbabwean land reform. Instead the government officials accused her of treason and said that she would have to die for compromising the nation’s image.

The next day the police attempted to ambush Hambira at her office, but she was tipped off of what was awaiting her at work and quickly went into hiding. Eventually Hambira would flee Zimbabwe by land to South Africa, and then eventually came to Canada where her daughter was studying at the University of Manitoba.

The Charleswood Rotary Club is largely to thank for helping the entire family get to Canada, and one member is even letting the family stay in a house he originally bought to run a business out of.

For more on this story, check out the Winnipeg Free Press article by Carol Sanders below, or watch Hambira’s documentary House of Justice.

-Aaron Zeghers

From The Winnipeg Free Press
Originally Published Dec. 22, 2011

A human rights hero’s life-altering move
Peaceful Christmas in Winnipeg after chilling death-sentence escape

An exiled labour leader who fought for the rights of more than a million farm workers in chaotic Zimbabwe has been living quietly in Winnipeg for almost a year.

Now that she has her three youngest children safely out of the country and with her, Gertrude Hambira can talk about it.
A death warrant was issued for her after she produced a documentary exposing the violence and torture involved in President Robert Mugabe’s land reforms.

She picked up her son George, then 5, from school one day and fled Zimbabwe for her life the next.

“I was driving from work with little George when I learned the office is under siege,” she said.

Hambira, the first woman to run the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe, produced the documentary House of Justice with evidence of the beatings and torture of farm workers and owners by government thugs. She invited government officials and community leaders to see it. They didn’t see it as constructive criticism but treason, she said.

“You tarnished the image of the country. You need to die,” one high-ranking government official told her, she recalled. He was ready to make good on that threat a day later when Hambira avoided an ambush at the union office and got away, she said.

“Luckily I had my passport in my handbag.”

Someone picked up little George and she went into hiding, going to a safe house before getting out of the country overland through Zambia to South Africa.

She and her husband, George, an electrician, got refugee status in Canada, where her oldest daughter was completing a masters degree at the University of Manitoba. The three youngest children, including George, who’s now 7, Kuda, 15, and Shamiso, 18, were taken care of by family and friends. The Rotary Club of Charleswood rallied behind the family to bring the kids here last month. The family lives in Charleswood and the kids are thriving in school.

It’s almost surreal for Hambira, sitting next to the Christmas tree in their quiet living room.

After challenging white land owners and winning better pay and working conditions for farm workers, Hambira faced an even bigger battle with the Mugabe government.

“I went from the frying pan to the fire.”

The government ordered land reforms that kicked out the white owners and the black workers. The farms went out of production. The land was given to government ministers and supporters and the economy of Zimbabwe, once the biggest food producer in Africa, collapsed. When the Southern African Development Community — a kind of supreme court for the region — ruled the land reforms were unjust and overturned them, the Mugabe regime ignored it. Farmers and workers returning to the land were beaten and run off the property.

Hambira thinks she’ll never be able to return to Zimbabwe and wants the world to know what is happening there. More than 1.4 million agricultural workers lost their homes and livelihoods, said Hambira, who’s been invited to speak around the world.
She hopes the Canadian Museum for Human Rights can one day help to educate people, and she wants to be part of it.
“I’ve never stopped advocating on behalf of workers in my country.”

Who is Gertrude Hambira?

The 50-year-old began work as a factory machinist at 19, a year after Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain.

In 1987, she became a trade union educator with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.

In 2000, elected the first woman secretary general of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe.

She belonged to the Coalition Against Child Labour in Zimbabwe to prevent the exploitation of children as workers and another group trying to educate people about HIV/AIDS.

In 2009, she produced the documentary House of Justice and was exiled from Zimbabwe. See http://vimeo.com/24309617.

In 2010, she moved to Winnipeg and still advocates for human rights.

-Carol Sanders

ABOVE: A still from the George Landow aka. Owen Land film “Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present” (1973) courtesy of Anthology Film Archives

Check out THIS ARTICLE by local filmmaker Heidi Phillips analyzing experimental filmmaker George Landow’s religious references within his body of work. The article was recently published through Screen Slate, an online daily listing for all motion picture related events in New York City.

In that article, Phillips supports the suggestion that Landow is perhaps one of the few experimental filmmakers to address christianity in his work, which is obviously of interest to Phillips since she often does the same within her own work. Phillips goes on to analyze the many instances that Landow does approach the subject of christianity in his films. She also reveals some really telling quotes from Landow about his stance on combining religion and art, and even the connection he saw between avant-garde art and christianity:

“In that way I think there is a link or parallel between Christianity and avant-garde art. It’s interesting that it should come around to that, because there are two things that are almost considered to have no connection, but in a funny way there is one because they’re both anti-conventional, and in essence, although Christianity has become a convention, and so has avant-garde art in museums. Both have been academicized.”

George Landow aka. Owen Land (among other titles) was an influential American experimental filmmaker and an early contributor to the structural film movement, creating the majority of his work in the 60s and 70s. Landow passed away earlier this year in June.

Heidi Phillips is a champion of found footage and filmic textures. For more about her, check out this Cineflyer Article.

-Aaron Zeghers

ABOVE: The St. Boniface Cathedral burns.

Watch Loveletter to St.Boniface HERE!

One of my favourite moments in Mireille Huberdeau’s (now known as Rémy Huberdeau) documentary short, Loveletter to St. Boniface, is the scene where she scales a wall to reach the St. Boniface Cathedral roof. It must be the middle of snowy January. The roof looks slick and slippery. Undaunted with her camera in hand, Huberdeau carries on to the top and treats us to a rooftop view of two kids with hoodies in the dimly lit ruins below. They dance like goofs for the camera, smiling and free. The scene so captured my imagination that it inspired the Cathedral scenes in my short film, FM Youth.

The Cathedral itself has always been a magnet for us living in St. Boniface. We’re drawn to these ruins that are steeped within the very roots of our identity and our history. Whether you’re religious or not makes no difference. You know that all of your ancestors have passed through this very place since the start of it all. We hang out on her steps late at night with our friends and talk about what’s going on in the neighbourhood. We air out all our secrets and theirs too. We try to figure out where we belong.

It must have been about six or seven years ago. I remember seeing a poster with Burton Cummings’ head and something about Franco-Manitoban films taped to the door of the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain. Burton Cummings was a pretty polarizing figure in the French community at the time. His ties to Salisbury House and Mayor Sam Katz arose suspicion that he may have been involved in the deal to tarnish L’Esplanade Riel’s vacant “1-million-dollar-toilet” bridge space with a Sal’s. Needless to say, Burton’s likeness sold me on this screening.

I had recently graduated from the U of M’s Film Studies program and I had a desire to know more about my own culture’s films. The screening included some of the earliest films from Manitoba, shot by l’Abbé Léon Rivard, and a lot of experimental films, from Québec and elsewhere, that left me scratching my head as to their relevance to the Franco-Manitoban theme. However, there was one short Franco-Manitoban documentary film that stood out for me and has stayed with me ever since. Mireille Huberdeau’s Loveletter to St. Boniface was a defining moment in my film and cultural education. I consider it one of the starting points for my growing obsession with St. Boniface. It was contemporary, controversial and deeply personal. It challenged everything I’d ever been told to believe in. Most importantly, it was unlike any Franco-Manitoban film I’d ever seen. It spoke to me directly.

The film introduces us to Huberdeau, a young woman, who confides that she struggles with memories of growing up queer in St. Boniface. She tells us that she never felt fully accepted by her own community. She goes on to exposes the elitism and homophobia present in the community and wonders if the Franco-Manitoban culture is in fact dying or if it might actually be suicidal, unwilling to grow and progress with the times.

ABOVE: A still of the last survivor of the Louis Riel Resistance from Rémy Huberdeau’s film, Au pays des esprits / Home of the Buffalo

I have to admit that it was difficult for me to watch. At the time, I was heavily invested in the community. I had acted in plays by the Cercle Molière and the Collège Universitaire de St. Boniface (which she criticizes quite heavily in the film) and I had worked with several Franco-Manitoban youth organizations. I felt like one of the Franco-Manitoban poster children Huberdeau was challenging. It occurred to me that I’d been living in a kind of Franco-Manitoban bubble. Huberdeau was showing me the way out.

My first reaction was anger. How could this person tell me that my Franco-Manitoban community was elitist and prejudice? Suicidal even! After all, weren’t we the ones in danger of assimilation? Fighting to survive? Weren’t the effects of that assimilation fully displayed in the way she spoke? It made me cringe to watch her speak a disjointed mix of French and English throughout most of the film. The way I saw it, if she was going to indict her whole French-speaking community, she should at least speak the correct language and consistently. Speaking a mixture of the two languages was only reserved for casual conversation amongst friends, never for any kind of “official” broadcast. We wouldn’t want others to hear how we’d mangled the French language. Radio-Canada (Manitoba) and Les Productions Rivard even require a certain “universal” accent for their radio and television hosts. The Franco-Manitoban accent isn’t good enough. (I’m reminded of the way my mother softens her accent ever so slightly when she speaks to a Quebecker.)

I realized that I wasn’t accustomed to hearing our own voices being broadcast through speakers. It was embarrassing at first. We all harbour resentment towards our own failings with the French language and those of our peers. We cringe every single time we hear an errant word or an anglicized expression. Huberdeau’s common way of speaking was a statement. It was the equivalent of confronting one’s self in the mirror, receding hairline, wrinkles and all. Hard to take at first but liberating at the same time. It became a representation of truly uninhibited and free Franco-Manitoban expression for me. An undeniable truth.

ABOVE: Stéphane Oystryk

Her observation that homophobia and elitism had stifled the progress of the community began to resonate in me as well. Homophobic undercurrents did in fact exist in St. Boniface at time. I’d witnessed it first hand in Ottawa of all places. By some sort of weird coincidence, I had been in the House of Commons as an observer during the vote to legalize gay marriage. Raymond Simard, federal Liberal MP for St. Boniface, voted against the act that day. He stated that he had voted in the interests of the constituency. It made me sick to my stomach because I knew we weren’t standing on the right side of history. I knew that history would remember St. Boniface’s vote to deny equality to a whole segment of the population.

As for the elitism, Huberdeau observed it in the animosity that immersion students feel towards the French community. It reminded me that, as children, we weren’t ever encouraged to fraternize with immersion kids. Even today, the French school division’s policy does not allow for certain mixed cultural activities with immersion students. The fear is that their “poorer” language skills will hinder our own. This prejudiced attitude instills a feeling of entitlement and superiority in Franco-Manitoban kids. Why did there have to be such a large divide between me and kids who were just trying to learn a new language? I began to agree with Huberdeau that it was hypocritical of the French community to put down immersion kids just because their accent was “too English”, the very same kind of prejudice Franco-Manitobans are subjected to when traveling to Quebec or France.

It’s this kind of wall building that Huberdeau laments as she sits on the roof of a Cathedral that’s been completely gutted by flames and of which only the stone walls remain. I can’t help but think that this image serves as an analogy for her statement that Franco-Manitobans are a suicidal culture. We may do everything possible to insulate our culture from outside influences, but it only suffocates us in the end. There’s nowhere to go from here and there’s nothing new to see. We look back and celebrate our carefully idealized past ad nauseum as today’s voices are muted or simply do not exist.

Provencher Boulevard remains underdeveloped and culturally dead, the “C’est si bon!” signs lining its sidewalks seem to ring false and there are very few venues for the new generation to express themselves in their own words and work towards defining an identity for themselves. Everything is drowned out by an explosion of 55+ condominium projects and nursing home developments that have begun to saturate St. Boniface, a sign of a rapidly ageing population. If what Huberdeau says is true, one day, all that will be left to remember us by will be old folks homes with French names and a Cathedral’s ruined walls standing in the midst of a community gutted of its vibrancy and relevance.

From the first shot, Loveletter to St. Boniface takes the perspective of an outsider looking in. The old Provencher bridge becomes the film’s gateway into a culturally sheltered St. Boniface. We enter from the west or the “Anglo” part of the city as we sometimes refer to it. This opening shot explicitly portrays the division between St. Boniface and the rest of Winnipeg. However, I like to think that bridges aren’t only representative of division in this film. They become a recurring visual trope that seems to entice the viewer to think about what’s on the other side. I feel as though she’s trying to get us to realize that living insulated lives is no way to live at all. Bridges bring people together, they don’t have to be reminders of otherness.

-Stéphane Oystryk

Thanks to Leslie Supnet for the above poster!

Cineflyer is proud to present a film screening of collected works from one of our favourite independent animators, Jodie Mack.

Currently an assistant professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Jodie Mack is an expert in paper cut-out and stop-motion animation and all sorts of camera-less animation. Mack has made narratives, musicals, and experimental films, all within the bounds of her beautiful and painstaking hand-manipulated animation. Judging by many of her films it is clear that Mack has an unbridled passion for colours that punch, and patterns that boggle the mind. An appreciation for musicals is shown through many of her hands-on musical stylings, as is her penchant for narratives that are fun, thoughtful and unbelievably adorable.

Among the films to be screened on 16mm and digitally will be Mack’s longest and perhaps most intricate film to date, Yard Work is Hard Work. This experimental narrative/musical is what Mack label’s “an animated musical featurette made with thousands of cut-outs from discarded printed materials. The piece follows a pair of newlyweds as they learn the perils of home ownership and life in general.”

Also to be shown will be Mack’s Unsubscribe Series, including Special Offer Inside on 16mm and Glitch Envy, a paper animated ode to glitch films. Also screening will be a variety of Mack’s early hand-painted, hand-manipulated, and camera-less animations.

Mack’s films have played at prestigious festivals and venues around the world, including the Anthology Film Archives, Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Black Maria Film Festival. She has also worked as a curator and administrator for many festivals, like the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Yet, to my knowledge, none of Mack’s films have screened in Winnipeg, and many of the films to be shown are not available online so make sure to make it out for this one-night-only screening on Dec. 5th, at 7PM in the Video Pool Studio (300-100 Arthur St.)!

-Aaron Zeghers-

Ghost Town Manitoba, alongside Ace Art Inc., CKUW and UMFM, is presenting a rare 16mm screening of Montreal Main (1974) this Saturday.

The 1974 fictional narrative stars the film’s director Frank Vitale as a photographer living in the midst of a group of artistic outcasts.  Frank develops a friendship with a young boy looking for escape from his own life, causing some tensions due to the taboo nature of their relationship.

The film is heralded as “a cinéma vérité depiction of an offbeat generation, worlds apart from today” despite the fact that it is a fictional feature.  The documentary feel of the film is likely attributed to the fact that Vitale got most of his friends to play themselves in the film, despite being put into fictional situations.

The film is also a rare glimpse into Montreal as of 37 years ago, in a neighbourhood that has since been revitalized.

Check out Ryan Simmons’ Cineflyer Radio interview with the film’s director HERE!

Also playing with Montreal Main will be Winnipeg director Norma Bailey’s NFB short, The Performer.

Montreal Main plays at Ace Art Inc. on Saturday, Nov. 19th, at 8:30PM.  Admission is $8.

-Aaron Zeghers

Only 3 days left to contribute and help publish INCITE Journal of Experimental Media‘s third issue, NEW AGES.  A long-time supporter and friend of the Winnipeg experimental film and media scene, Brett Kashmere, filmmaker, writer, curator, and publisher of INCITE has provided much needed critical dialogue and attention to filmmakers and media artists working today.

<<<Donate Here! >>>…however small, every contribution counts!

INCITE#3 aims at addressing the generational shifts and divides in today’s experimental film, video, and new media spheres, utilizing the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress as an opportunity for reflection. In addition to compiling a dossier of idiosyncratic reflections on the Congress, this issue also focuses on the renewed fascination with “New Age” spirituality, philosophy and aesthetics among contemporary media artists.

Other highlights of this issue include Walter Forsberg‘s wide-ranging essay about the computer animation pioneer Lillian Schwartz (which comes with a 3-D twist), Thomas Beard‘s astute analysis of Shana Moulton‘s Whispering Pines video serial, a Jacob Ciocci and Jesse McLean “G-Chat,” Jaimz Asmundson on his new film, The Magus, and Brian L. Frye‘s citation study of The New York Times, which measures the relative importance of avant-garde filmmakers.

Since 2008, INCITE has produced two print issues (“Manifest” and “Counter-Archive”) containing scholarly articles, manifestos, artist statements and original drawings; as well as an artist multiple, a DVD compilation, an ongoing, online interview series (Back and Forth), and numerous screenings, events, and launch parties. Past contributors and collaborating organizations include Jonas Mekas, Jenny Perlin, Richard Kerr, Bruce Conner, Craig Baldwin, Double Negative Collective, Ben Russell, Tasman Richardson, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Cory Arcangel, Penny Lane, Michael Robinson, Aleesa Cohene, The Images Festival (Toronto), WNDX: Winnipeg Festival of Film and Video Art, Available Light Screening Collective (Ottawa), The Waffle Shop, and Pittsburgh’s SPF: Small Press Festival, among many others.

Contributors for Issue #3 include: 
Dominic Angerame
Jaimz Asmundson
Jeremy Bailey
Christina Battle
Thomas Beard
Roger Beebe
Michael Betancourt
Mireille Bourgeois
Jacob Ciocci
Clint Enns
Walter Forsberg
Brian L. Frye
Benj Gerdes
Brett Kashmere
Eliza Koch
Kevin McGarry
Jesse McLean
James Missen
Shana Moulton
Peter Nowogrodzki
Marisa Olson
Andrew James Paterson
Ken Paul Rosenthal
Ekrem Serdar
Leslie Supnet
Tess Takahashi

10 AM – 1 PM /// Albert Maysles Master Class

2 PM – 4 PM /// Panel Discussion on Québec Masters

7 PM /// The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee Scratch Perry, introduced by Adam Bhala Lough (plays with The Magus, by Jaimz Asmundson)

9 PM /// Nostalgia for the Light, by Patricio Guzman (plays with Maiden Indian, by the Ephemerals)

11 PM /// Manitoba Filmmakers Party at the Fairmont Hotel Lounge for all ticket and pass holders.

With master classes, panel discussions and a couple film screenings, it’s tough to say what the highlight of third day of the four-day Gimme Some Truth documentary forum will be.

Starting off the day is a 3-hour master class with legendary doumentary pioneer Albert Maysles. If you haven’t already signed up for this workshop it’s too bad, because it’s all full up. However, Cineflyer will be posting some clips from the class for those who are missing out.

Following Maysles’ master class is the Quebec Masters Panel from 2-4 PM, focusing on the Quebec Masters series from Friday evening. In attendence will be filmmaker Arthur Lamothe, whose Friday night documentary Bûcherons de la Manouane chronicles the daily lives of Quebecois loggers in 1963. Also in the Quebec Masters program on Friday night, is La Lutte, a film about Quebec’s pro wrestling scene. One of the films’ directors, Claude Fournier, will also be on the panel that will likely focus on discussing Quebec’s cinéma direct scene from the 1960s.

At 7PM, The Upsetter is screening and will be introduced in person by director Adam Bhala-Lough. The Upsetter chronicles the life of regge and hip-hop guru Lee “Scratch” Perry, now in his mid seventies and expatriated to Switzerland. Lough and co-director Ethan Higbee get unprecidented access to this aging star and his cryptic yet poetic diatribes. Lough has done a number of notable music docs, and will be speaking further on this subject at his Master Class on Independent Music Documentary on Sunday at 10 AM.

Rounding out the night is Nostalgia for the Light, made by Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. The film explores the duality of the Atacama desert, which serves as both the location of the world’s largest astronomical telescope and the final resting place for many murdered by Chile’s Pinocet regime. The film juxtaposes those searching the stars for a greater meaning or understanding of the human existence, and those searching the desert for a greater understanding of the human atrocities of the past.

The evening closes with a soire for filmmakers, pass and ticket holders at the Fairmont Hotel Lounge at 11 PM.

Trailers for the films playing on Day 3 are found below! The entire Gimme Some Truth program can be found HERE!

-Aaron Zeghers

12 PM – 2 PM /// Marketing Case Study: How to Make Money on Your Doc Short

5 PM /// DOC Winnipeg welcome reception at the King’s Head Pub

7 PM /// Québec Masters shorts screening

9 PM /// Salesman, introduced by Albert Maysles (plays with Honky Tonk Ben by Ryan McKenna)

With Albert Maysles in person, the touching, disturbing and hilarious cinéma vérité documentary Salesman is sure to be the highlight of Gimme Some Truth‘s Friday events. But that’s not to undermine a full day of great programming put on by Winnipeg’s annual documentary forum and hosted by the Winnipeg Cinematheque.

The Québec Masters screening at 7 PM is a compilation of three “cinéma direct” films from Canada’s francophone province, all made in the early 60s. On the bill is Claude Jutra’s Rouli-roulant, exploring Montreal’s skateboarding community when the sport was in it’s infancy. Also in the line-up is La Lutte (1961) which explores professional wrestling in Quebec.

There is also a panel consisting of Winnipeg Film Group distributor Monica Lowe, and Winnipeg filmmaker Caroline Monnet simply titled How to Make Money on Your Doc Short at Noon at the Cinematheque.

The 9 PM screening is the Maysles’ brother’s documentary Salesman. If you have never seen this movie, get into that Cinematheque seat because this film made documentary history. It was the first film to have widespread theatrical distribution and also among the first to abandon voiceover and interviews. At age 84, the film’s director and camera man Albert Maysles will be introducing this film.

Alongside the Maysles’ Salesman is Ryan McKenna’s short documentary, Honk Tonk Ben. In this Winnipeg-made short we are introduced to Honky Tonk Ben himself, who made extravagant and custom modified, olden-timey saloon pianos. This film has some truly gorgeous art direction, a great soundtrack and a capturing story.

Below is an article from Criterion’s The Current about Salesman.

-Aaron Zeghers

From the Criterion Collection’s “The Current”, Sept. 3, 2011:

Salesman

The Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter takes one of the defining moments of the 1960s, the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert, and helps us see what all the fuss of youth rebellion was all about. Given their prowess in examining the counterculture of that tumultuous decade, it’s doubly impressive that their exquisite Salesman (1969) so skillfully details the “other” ’60s, the world of “ordinary” people animated by making do with everyday life rather than preoccupations with Vietnam, drugs, and social change. These are the door-to-door Bible salesmen and their customers, and they occupy a world of starched white shirts, dark ties, pork-pie hats, and morning cigarette coughs—a world far removed from tie-dyes, beads, long hair, and pot highs.

Salesman takes us inside the diurnal rituals and disappointments of men who clearly resemble Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The result is a classic of American normalcy exposed. The difference between this and Miller’s play is that the dialogue here is, of course, real: the clients’ curlers are in, their Muzak LPs are playing, and we’re really no longer in Kansas, Toto. Both Albert and David Maysles had been door-to-door salesmen—brushes, cosmetics, encyclopedias, you name it. They knew this world of pseudo-intimacy and carpetbagger pushiness, in all its improbable, American folksiness. When, making this film, they turned up at peoples’ doors with the salesmen, recording equipment in tow, they too became part of the pitch, or as it was politely called, “presentation.” When folks permitted the salesmen and filmmakers to enter, they were invited to do so as part of a “human interest story.” The result was an instant classic, one that’s been part of the documentary canon for over three decades.

The key sales characters each have animal nicknames—the Rabbit, the Gipper, the Bull, and the one we hear from the most, the Badger (Paul Brennan). Alongside the others, the Badger is hardly a go-getter. He becomes Willy Loman, but self-consciously so. His sales figures are down, and so is his confidence. As he compensates by telling his co-workers and his boss various stories about the people he meets and the impossibility of closing sales with them, his projections of inadequacy become overpowering and compelling. The Badger’s more successful colleagues can barely stand to hear these ironic, witty, self-pitying tales of woe. The looks on their faces become more and more resigned, less and less prepared to engage. The Badger becomes someone you turn away from. He is the person—the future—you hope not to be.

Underneath this critique of failure and smallness lies a more powerful indictment of American commercial society: its petty obsessions with status, its propensity to exploit the gullible, its way of concealing exploitation behind goodwill, and above all, its snide trick of offering religion and its promise of deliverance in the afterlife, rather than improvements in everyday life. This is all the more poignant here, where faith itself is neatly commodified as though it were a new model of vacuum cleaner.

The Badger—Paul—evokes this desolate territory pithily and tragically, all the while singing “If I Were a Rich Man.” His bons mots include referring to “ball-breaking territory” where householders are “ducking behind doors.” His colleagues’ suggestions that “It’s not the bum territory—it’s the bum in the territory” help him rationalize this. Paul’s associates smilingly inflate themselves and their sales plans at a convention with a smarmy self-satisfaction that the filmmakers intercut with footage of Paul. He is elsewhere, staring depressively from a rail carriage, watching America pass by while somewhere else, imaginary numbers float from the mouths of his competitor-colleagues. Whereas they happily participate in improbably banal role-playing practice and hype sessions to hone their skills and feel better about themselves, Paul is always wry and dubious, never far from mocking sincerity—sold door-to-door.

-Toby Miller

Toby Miller is is a British/Australian-American interdisciplinary social scientist with areas of concentration including cultural studies and media studies.

The local media previewed today some this year’s local documentary forum, Gimme Some Truth.

Below are some articles by Kenton Smith of Uptown Magazine and an anonymous “staff writer” from the Winnipeg Free Press.

From Uptown Magazine, Oct. 13th, 2011:

The Great Northern roots of documentary filmmaking
Winnipeg-based forum Gimme Some Truth returns, highlighting documentary filmmaking’s definitive Quebec connection

The documentary, Canadian filmmaker and Manufacturing Consent co-director Peter Wintonick told Uptown last year, is our country’s “most important cultural export.” That’s appropriate: after all, according to local documentarian Kristin Tresoor, Canada invented it.

While the doc’s roots are traceable to cinema’s infancy, Canada’s National Film Board “was essential to its coming into being,” says Tresoor, who’s produced docs for CTV and the CBC and is a programming committee member for Gimme Some Truth, the now-annual Winnipeg documentary forum that enjoys its fourth manifestation this week.

As the modern doc evolved, she continues, it was several Quebec masters who “revolutionized filmmaking.

“Things like the hand-held camera and sync sound in documentaries — these are taken for granted now,” Tresoor says of the NFB’s French Unit, home to the so-called Cinema Direct movement in Canada, which focused on everyday subjects and people.

These filmmakers will be recognized Friday as part of the program Quebec Masters: Cinema Direct, curated by Tresoor and highlighting the likes of Claude Jutra (best known for drama Mon Oncle Antoine), and Arthur Lamothe, who will take part in a panel discussion.

Dovetailing with that is Sunday evening’s St. Boniface Shorts program, featuring Winnipeg auteur Stephane Oystryk’s 177, boulevard Dollard (which is also part of tonight’s opening-night screening alongside seminal 1975 doc Grey Gardens).

For a 90-second film, Oystryk’s has grabbed a fair share of recent attention: CBC Radio-Canada has interviewed the filmmaker repeatedly about his film’s implications for St. Boniface. A “kind of poetic visual ode” to Oystryk’s grandparents’ old house, the film questions whether the community’s “official” sloganeering (“C’est si bon!”) reflects anything of existing Franco-Manitoban culture.

Like the work of the Quebec masters, it’s about real life in a real community, now.

And, Oystryk adds, it will hopefully “get people thinking about what’s going on around them.

“What was really exciting was to find out that my opinion was shared by so many others and that people felt passionately about the subject,” he says of the media flutter.

The film is not “a traditional documentary by any means,” he continues — more of “an opinion piece or a video diary.” Nonetheless, certain constants of documentary filmmaking apply, in contrast to Oystryk’s dramatic shorts.

“So much of the creativity comes into play in the post-production phase — the editing is the writing, in a sense.”

The attention won by 177, boulevard Dollard also reflects the more saleable nature of the short doc. “In my experience, our member filmmakers have made more revenue on docs than dramas,” says Monica Lowe, distribution services manager for the artist-run Winnipeg Film Group. (This year’s forum features a master class on the same subject.)

There’s more: in what amounts to a coup, says Tresoor, 85-year-old Grey Gardens director Albert Maysles will speak as part of a master class on Saturday. Here in its geographical centre, the foundations of one of Canada’s definitive cultural traditions are being reinforced.

Gimme Some Truth takes place Oct. 13 to 16; for complete information and schedules of screenings, workshops, panels and talks, visit gimmesometruth.ca.

-Kenton Smith

From the Winnipeg Free Press, Oct. 13, 2011:

Legendary filmmaker Maysles to show work, teach at fest

A legendary 84-year-old documentarian who captured the Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter and a pair of eccentric socialites in Grey Gardens is appearing tonight through Saturday at the Winnipeg Film Group’s fourth annual Gimme Some Truth documentary festival and forum.
Albert Maysles (pronounced Mazels) will introduce a screening of Grey Gardens tonight at 7 at Cinematheque, followed by a 9 p.m. reception at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café.

The famous and influential 1976 documentary follows “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, mother-and-daughter relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy who lived in reclusive squalor in a decaying mansion. It was remade in 2009 as an HBO movie starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

Maysles will also introduce his classic 1968 black-and-white doc Salesman at 9 p.m. on Friday, and lead a master class on non-fiction directing on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tickets are still available for all three events. It’s believed to be Maysles first time in Winnipeg.

“We’ve been trying to get him for a while,” said the WFG’s Cecilia Araneda, producer of the festival.

Maysles, now based in New York, was born in Boston. With his brother David, who died in 1987, he was a pioneer of the Direct Cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Their films include a documentary on the Beatles’ first visit to the U.S. in 1964.

Their revolutionary fly-on-the-wall style, using newly developed portable equipment, was to simply record events as they happened, rather than trying to control or intrude upon their subjects.

“The Maysles brothers just allowed these engaging human beings to speak for themselves,” said Araneda.

Among the other screenings at the four-day festival is The Upsetter, a portrait of the life and music of Lee Scratch Perry, one of the fathers of reggae music. Director Adam Bhala Lough will introduce that film on Saturday at 7 p.m. and give a master class on making independent music docs.

Saturday at 9 p.m., the festival screens Nostalgia for the Light, an award-winning recent documentary by the Chilean Patricio Guzman. It has been hailed as a masterpiece for the parallels it draws between astronomers’ celestial quest and the search for the remains of the “disappeared” following the 1973 coup in Chile.

Schedule and ticket information at www.gimmesometruth.ca

- Staff Writer, WFP

7:00 PM – Grey Gardens, introduced by Albert Maysles (plays with 117 boulevard Dollard by Stéphane Oystryk) at the Winnipeg Cinematheuqe!

9:00 PM - Opening reception at the Winnipeg Free Press Cafe

Gimme Some Truth begins today at 7 PM with a screening of Grey Gardens (1976), introduced by Albert Maysles in person. A seminal documentary, Grey Gardens is a glimpse into the everyday life of a mother and daughter pair of reclusive socialites living in a dilapidated mansion, both named Edith Beale.

It is incredibly exciting that Albert Maysles will be both attending his screenings of his films this weekend (Grey Gardens, Salesman) as well as holding a Master Class for aspiring documentary filmmakers from 10 AM to 1 PM on Saturday. Maysles, alongside his late brother David Maysles, is a very important figure in documentary filmmaking and was one of the first champions of direct cinema or cinema vérité in the 60s and 70s.

The screening of Grey Gardens will be followed by an opening reception for Gimme Some Truth documentary forum at the nearby Free Press Cafe.

For more on Maysles, please check out our original Cineflyer article on him! Below I have also posted an article written in relation to Grey Gardens, the film opening the festival tonight at 7 PM at the Winnipeg Cinematheque.

-Aaron Zeghers

“In Direct Cinema we try to answer Virginia Woolf’s question that she asked in an essay of hers in 1926, and she asked “What, if left to its own devices, would cinema be?”. Well, I think left to its own devices cinema would be Direct Cinema. That is, documentary can requote reality I think more honestly and authentically, when done properly, than any other medium. If it is practiced properly, then it is more like photography than cinematography.”

-Albert Maysles in interview with Peter Tammer

“We can see two kinds of truth here. One is the raw material, which is the footage, the kind of truth that you get in literature in the diary form it’s immediate, no one has tampered with it. Then there’s another kind of truth that comes in extracting and juxtaposing the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent storytelling form, which finally can be said to be more than just raw data”

-Albert Maysles from Levin’s Documentary Explorations

From the The Criterion Collection, September 03, 2001.

Notes on Grey Gardens

In 1998, I interviewed “Little” Edie Beale, the surviving star of Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love From Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale, speaking by telephone from her home somewhere in Florida, said she spent her days swimming and occasionally seeing friends. She was still attiring herself in a singular manner (her self-described “costumes” are the visual corollary of her extraordinary speech), living as she had always lived: as an independent woman whose thoughts and actions were infused—not to say suffused—by the presence of her late mother, “Big” Edie Beale. Little Edie had spent most of her adult life with her mother; now she parted the warm, salty waves surrounding her Florida home alone.

In Miss Beale’s speech, one heard the Social Register that had excised the Beales from its pages long ago: long “a”s, a certain formality in addressing her interlocutor. There was also, in her voice, certain impatience with the demands of being ladylike. I recall, during the interview, being at a loss as to what I could or should ask Miss Beale. One felt—understandably—that one intimately knew her and her mother from the Maysles’ film. At any rate, Miss Beale had agreed to talk to me largely because Albert Maysles had asked her to do so; the piece was to appear sometime around the theatrical re-release of the documentary film she had starred in some twenty years before. During our talk, I asked Miss Beale several questions; my questions betrayed the awkward directness of a fan. I recall asking her if she liked women. “No!” she said emphatically. And, giggling softly, she said: “Women want the same things I want.” For Miss Beale, the world was her mother and therefore a mirror: she may not “like” other women, but she was them; other women were not distinguishable from her mother—and herself.

Such singularity of being is rare. It is also rare that it should be recorded so beautifully, and with such grace, since it is not unusual for artists to feel diminished by subjects they cannot invent, especially real life characters whose lives exceed anyone’s wildest imaginings. Odd to say, but this resentment can be especially true of documentary filmmakers, the weak ones at least, who too often compete with their subjects, insisting that their intrepid journalistic eye is the story we should be engaged by, not the people they’re “covering.” Grey Gardens is the visual evidence of Albert and David Maysles’ unique brilliance as portraitists, actively engaged by subjects who do not so much as sit for them (the Beales have too much energy, wit, and imagination to be passive subjects) as help them shape the film by exposing their emotional trajectory. That is the film’s ostensible narrative. Its haunting subtext is this: the truth is best presented through metaphor. The Beales are themselves, born into a particular class at a particular time. But they are also the selves they’ve created: a singer, a dancer, whose florid self-presentation cannot be eclipsed by hard times, bad times—so-called real life. Certainly the Maysles are interested in recording the Beales’ very real life—the ruined house crawling with cats and fleas, the paper bird in the rusty gilded cage, the mother and daughter quarrelling—but those are the film’s most superficial elements. What draws the viewer in are the stories around what we cannot see: Miss Beale lamenting the loss of a scarf. The suitors turned away. Mrs. Beale’s infatuation with a man whose minor musical talent is better remembered than heard. Money spent. The dream of New York on summer nights filled with jackhammers and the moon. Regrets and recriminations: the language of lovers, the fabric of family life. The Maysles’ interest in the ephemeral, the passing of time in a sea of leaves, tells us that masks are all we have; people would not know who they are or what to say without them. Time is cruel, but we can overcome it a bit by insisting on self-expression (at any cost, since it generally does cost something: a conventional life and the conventional wisdom that goes with it).

The Maysles’ deeply felt approach to these extraordinary women makes most other documentaries by their peers seem foolish, an embarrassment disguised as the truth. As embarrassing as asking Miss Beale impertinent questions on the telephone for journalism’s sake. What was there for her to say? The Maysles had provided her and her mother with a platform where they spoke and sang and shouted and saw so memorably and intimately, so long ago.

-Hilton Als, an American writer and theater critic who writes for The New Yorker magazine.