This year’s Gimli International Film Festival had a net attendance of roughly 9,000 people, the event’s largest audience since before the pandemic. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * This year’s Gimli International Film Festival had a net attendance of roughly 9,000 people, the event’s largest audience since before the pandemic. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? This year’s Gimli International Film Festival had a net attendance of roughly 9,000 people, the event’s largest audience since before the pandemic.
“It was our most successful year since 2019,” says festival executive director Teya Zuzek. “Considering that we’re still coming out of the pandemic, and considering the state of arts and culture throughout Canada and what’s happening at many other institutions, this shows that Manitoba has a strong love for the arts.” Prior to the pandemic, the festival’s audience exceeded 12,000 attendees.
In 2023, the organizers experimented with a hybrid format, combining an on-demand digital program with a return to live screenings; about 7,200 people attended. Zuzek, who was hired in November 2023, attributes the uptick in part to the festival’s attempts to broaden its reach ahead of the festival, which ran from July 24 to 28 in the interlake community. “A lot of it had to do with marketing,” she says.
“We appealed to a younger demographic through social media channels like TikTok and Letterboxd.” TikTok, the extremely popular video-sharing app, was used to show behind-the-scenes content, while Letterboxd, a social film-cataloguing app favoured by young cinephiles, was an official festival partner. The app, founded in 2011, has more than 10 million users and has a British Columbia company as a majority owner.
GIFF’s marketing team used the app to create lists of its films for easy digital access and to archive the lineups of festivals dating back to 2006, an homage to the festival’s past ahead of the 2025 festival, which will be its 25th. Zuzek, who relocated to Gimli from Toronto in January for the job, says that the next several months will be spent preparing for that landmark event. A few priorities are to increase the amount of French-language films and children’s programming, while also compiling a retrospective of the festival’s first quarter-century.
SUPPLIED PHOTO BY IAN MCCAUSLAND Winnipeg filmmaker and editor Karsten Wall won best Manitoban short. From a crop of more than 90 films, the festival’s jury selected 10 award winners. The best Manitoban director award went to Branden Joseph DeFoort for his disability rights documentary .
Karsten Wall’s , produced by the National Film Board of Canada, was named the best Manitoban short. The two best performance awards, sponsored by ACTRA, went to Harkaran Jhinger for his work in Ian Bawa’s , and Courtney Sawyer for hers in Ryan Ward’s Toronto’s Nedda Sarshar’s film was named the best Canadian short, while , a film by Hungary’s Flóra Anna Buda, was named the best international short. For – a story about a Métis boy fiddling to afford a new skateboard — Regina-born Andrew Konoff was given the Indigenous Spirit Award.
Illinois filmmaker Minhal Baig was the recipient of the New Voices Award for a coming-of-age story set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project. The grand jury’s Best of Fest award was given to Chilean director Maite Alberdi’s Alzheimer’s love story . In the community of New Iceland, the audience choice award went to the inventive animated documentary MICHELLE SIU / THE CANADIAN PRESS Zacharias Kunuk received The Alda Award for lifetime achievement at GIFF.
The Alda Award for lifetime achievement was given to Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk, whose was the first Canadian dramatic feature to use only Inuktitut dialogue. The Barry Lank Award, given to a filmmaker in recognition of their work’s social awareness, went to Sonya Ballantyne for her documentary . For her dedication to the festival, Lisa Martin was named this year’s recipient of the Betty Schwartz Memorial Volunteer Achievement Award.
SUPPLIED Sonya Ballantyne was honoured at GIFF with The Barry Lank Award for her documentary Nosisim and the work’s social awareness. Each year, the festival partners with the Royal Bank of Canada to award $10,000 in production funds to an emerging filmmaker through its pitch competition. This year’s winner is Coby Friesen for his idea, , described by the filmmaker as a “queer horror” set on an idyllic yet supposedly haunted beach.
Friesen, who won the top emerging filmmaker award at last year’s Reel Pride Film Festival, will screen the film at next year’s GIFF. ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.
com Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the . Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. .
Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
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Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the . Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. .
Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the ‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about , and . Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism.
If you are not a paid reader, please consider . Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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