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
Train Dreams
A lovely, ruminative movie set in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the last century. Robert (Joel Edgerton) is a lumberjack, a taciturn man who comes to appreciate the life slipping between his fingers.
Caravaggio
In the latest from Exhibition on Screen, co-directors David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky shed light not only on Caravaggio's paintings, but his life, often kept half-hidden in the same chiaroscuro tones he shaded his masterpieces with.
Köln 75
The true story behind the greatest solo concert in jazz history, this is Keith Jarrett's legendary 1975 Köln Concert — as organized by 18-year-old rebel music promoter Vera Brandes. Fun, inventive and feminist, it's the Bend It Like Beckham of jazz films.
La Belle at the Movies + Apostles of Cinema
Cecilia Zoppelletto's lyrical documentary examines the fate of cinephilia in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's capital city, currently without a single operating cinema. + Apostles of Cinema (Tanzania, 17 min)
Wisdom of Happiness
An audience with the Dalia Lama, who, at 90, looks back on his life and shares the tenets of Buddhism as a practical guide to surviving the 21st Century with joy and compassion.
Left-Handed Girl
Co-written and edited by Sean Baker (Anora), Shi-Ching Tsou's heartwarming solo feature debut follows a single mom in Taipei who is too consumed with her noodle stand to keep tabs on her five-year-old daughter's burgeoning shoplifting habit.