Manitoba artists in TIFF spotlight as fest begins

Expect Winnipeg film production — and Manitoba talent — to grab its share of the klieg lights at the 2026 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts today and runs to Sept. 20.

On the TIFF menu: the feature film debut of a local filmmaker who began taking short films to the festival 10 years ago.

In 2016, Ian Bawa arrived at the festival with three collaborators — Markus Henkel, Milos Mitrovic and Fabian Velasco — debuting their outrageous satire Imitations to the Short Cuts program, devoted to short films.

Bawa kept coming, scoring a short film hit in the COVID-truncated 2020 edition of TIFF with a personal project titled Strong Son, which featured his own father, Jagdeep Singh Bawa, in the role of a bodybuilder’s stern father.

The following year, in the course of a caretaking routine, Bawa discovered his dad dead in his room of heart failure.

That journey eventually compelled him to turn Strong Son into a feature, a more layered and complex look at the relationship between bodybuilder Harvey (Mandeep Sodhi) and his eccentric father (Amrit Parbhakar) in the aftermath of the death of Harvey’s mom.

Harvey’s efforts to take care of his aging dad are rooted in the experience of Bawa caring for his own father.

Making these films reflecting his own emotional journey has been therapeutic, Bawa says.

“It’s been cathartic. I’m bad at therapy. I haven’t been in a while, but I go to therapy and I have a hard time talking. I feel like I’m guarded,” Bawa says.

“But one of the things I’ve realized is I have a hard time talking unless it’s purposeful. And so I think when you’re making a film, it feels like there’s purpose because you’re delivering it to the world. And it’s easier to be a little more vulnerable, ever since my dad died, to challenge myself in this way because at least you’re sharing. I don’t know if it has been healthy therapy, and it’s definitely an expensive therapy, but it’s working.”

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Another purely Manitoba film, titled Where Our Flowers Grow, is the product of filmmaker Maxime Kornachuk, 24, as part of a TIFF-funded inaugural program called Redefine.

“Redefine is the first program of its kind,” Kornachuk says. “For the 50th (anniversary) of TIFF last year, they announced a program in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada. They would pick five filmmakers to make a documentary representing their perspective on what it is to be Canadian or Indigenous in the modern day.”

Kornachuk’s animated documentary uses Métis beadwork design to weave testimonies from Winnipeggers about their own Métis identity, including the surprisingly common story of people who grew up not knowing their heritage until much later in life.

Kornachuk says he is happy to be a part of a recent rising tide of Métis artists making films.

“To see all of these incredible Métis people creating content is so exciting because it’s creating a space for us,” he says. “I think the reason it’s happening now is we’re kind of making up for lost time. There have been people, very brave and proud people who never hid their Métis heritage and they didn’t go into hiding. I think now that people are coming back to the culture. People are now starting to investigate.

“The whole basis of my films has always been to create the film that I wish I had growing up, so that I could understand my culture.”

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After the success of the 2024 TIFF feature Universal Language, Winnipeg-born filmmaker Matthew Rankin returns to TIFF with an outrageously funny “documentary” about the ascent of a certain Quebec politician titled Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, a look at how the “boy from Baie-Comeau” ascended the ranks of the Progressive Conservative party to become prime minister.

The film, mostly put together from thousands of archived clips and photographs in Rankin’s Montreal apartment, is a return to the style Rankin and collaborators Mike Maryniuk and Walter Forsberg employed in the locally made documentary Death By Popcorn (2006) about the 1996 death of the Winnipeg Jets franchise, or Negativipeg (2010), Rankin’s own investigation into a notorious assault on Burton Cummings in a North End convenience store.

“At the Canadian Screen Awards last year, a journalist asked me if, because of the success of Universal Language, I felt some pressure to make something even more accessible for an even wider, non-Canadian audience.” Rankin says in an email interview.

“My answer was: ‘Apparently not! My next movie is about Brian Mulroney!’

“So, yes, I have really quadrupled down on parochialism with this one, but I’ve never been very calculated about my career moves. Nor have I ever been driven by any yearning for money or power, which means I will have to keep working until the day I drop dead.

“Really I’m just following what thrills my soul.”

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Manitoba is more obliquely represented with a TIFF preview screening of the upcoming MGM+ miniseries American Hostage, starring Jon Hamm and Giovanni Ribisi as, respectively, a real-life 1970s era radio journalist and the angry hostage taker who demands a live interview while he holds a bank executive hostage with a rifle wired to the back of his head.

The eight-episode series, based on a podcast of the same name, is set in Indianapolis, but showcases a wealth of local talent in the cast, including Harry Nelken as the radio-station’s sportscaster, Darcy Fehr, Lauren Cochrane, Aaron Merke and Eric Athavale, among many others.

The show premières on Crave Sept. 20.

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Manitoba actress Summer H. Howell has made a stellar reputation for herself in a series of locally lensed horror films, including Hunter, Hunter and Curse of Chucky. Howell decidedly hits the jackpot this year in the title role of the Vancouver-lensed Carrie, an eight-episode miniseries for Prime Video directed by Mike Flanagan, whose Stephen King adaptations also include the films Dr. Sleep and The Life of Chuck.

Next week’s TIFF première will be the public’s first look at Howell taking on the role of telekinetic teen Carrie White, a part that jump-started the career of Sissy Spacek in 1976.

Carrie premières Oct. 7.

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