When SHAW Cable purchased Winnipeg’s local cable station VPW, rumor circulated that they had destroyed the public access television archives and were systematically dismantling the public access services. Shortly thereafter, artist Daniel Barrow began researching, compiling and archiving a history of independently produced television in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In the late 70s and throughout the 80s, Winnipeg experienced a golden age of public access television. Anyone with a creative dream, concept or politic would be endowed with airtime and professional production services. Winnipeg Babysitter traces unique vignettes from a brief synapse in broadcasting history when Winnipeg cable companies were mandated to provide public access as a condition of their license. Because the archives were destroyed, programs could only be found in the VHS collections of the original producers, television collectors, fans and enthusiasts. Winnipeg Babysitter is an archival project that restores a previously lost history.
Daniel Barrow performs an overhead projected commentary, tracing the histories of public access television in Manitoba, and describing the various biographies of each television producer and personality.
About the Ironworks Series
VIFF Live is giving four Resident Artists the opportunity to immerse themselves in the 2023 Festival and perform at The Ironworks.
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Guest
Daniel Barrow
Artist, Curator, Archivist
Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, they have created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Daniel Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art TBA Festival, and the British Film Institute (London). Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Turner & Constable
Filmed as a supplement to a blockbuster exhibition at Tate Britain happening right now, this doc in the popular Exhibition on Screen series allows us to view these competitive, complementary English landscape artists side by side.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
One of only a handful of live action children's films to capture the imaginations of generations, E.T. has a luminous warmth; it's a suburban symphony of emotion, and it's fascinating to revisit it in the light of The Fabelmans.
The President's Cake
Nine year old Lamia and her friend Saeed venture into the city to scrounge ingredients for a cake to celebrate Sadaam Hussein's birthday — a quest fraught with real peril in precarious times. Winner, Camera d'Or, Cannes.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.