WFG: a Short Film Programme

Made at the Winnipeg Film Group during its fifty-year history, this series of offbeat short films uses home movies, dramatic scenes and documentary footage to engage with the local Jewish community’s past and present. In Zachary Rothman’s My Own Partridge Family (2002), an apathetic film student discovers the remnants of another family’s long-lost home movies that have been buried within a local pawn shop. Noam Gonick’s 1919 (1997) revisits the legendary Winnipeg General Strike through a fictional group of gay men who frequent a Chinese bathhouse, a location which is imagined as the point of convergence for the riots. In It's a Hobby for Harvey (1980), filmmaker Barry Lank follows Harvey Pollack (known as ‘The Whistling Lawyer’) from his Winnipeg Law offices to the stage of the Centennial Concert Hall, performing with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Solomon Nagler’s untitled2 (2003) presents a hand-processed/ color-manipulated portrait of the last member of a Jewish farming colony in Central Canada who guards over the precious relics of an idealistic past. Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Ma’ayan Rypp explores themes of tradition, memory and continuity in The Great Wolodarsky Cribbage Tournament (2019).

Part of TJFF CITY SPOTLIGHT: WINNIPEG.