The hip crowd in Winnipeg has long known about it. But for those outside the scene: There exists a little 120-seat haven of cinema art in the downtown core, a spot for everything from the highly praised new Canadian documentary Up The Yangtze to the underground shocker Flaming Creatures, a cult short notoriously confiscated in the early 1960s by New York police on obscenity charges. It’s a home for the multi-award-winning Quebec film Continental, un film sans fusil and also the French documentary Llik Your Idols about the psychoneurotic grindhouse of post-punk New York filmmaking in the late 1970s.
Yes, Winnipeg isn’t above a little weirdness. Add to these a selection of groundbreaking experimental films coming out of the city, in all of their warped creative glory induced by months of bitter cold, and you have a sense of the repertoire and indeed the civic function of the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
“It’s an eclectic mix,” said Dave Barber, the Cinematheque’s programmer, who has been with the Film Group since the early 1980s.
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