Photo: Donald Gislason
For twenty-four years, the town of Gimli has been the host to the Gimli International Film Festival (GIFF). If you like film, including Icelandic films, diversity, and a magical experience, plan on attending next year for its 25th anniversary. You can’t go wrong. There are even shuttle buses that will take you out from Winnipeg for the day and drive you back in the evening following the end of the movie on the beach!
“We are now the largest film festival in rural Canada, held on the shores of our beautiful Lake Winnipeg,” says Janis Johnson, festival chair and founder. “We believe that film is our ‘window on the world’ with stories for everyone on the screens in our venues and on the beach under the stars, where films are shown every night on a huge screen.”
At each venue, while we awaited the film to start, the screen read: “Our society is shaped by the stories we hear, and by those we choose to tell. The festival chooses to champion those films that speak to truth and equity for Indigenous communities and will continue to work toward greater reconciliation.”
And the GIFF organizers followed through with a series of wonderful Indigenous-made films to watch. In fact, the award for the best emerging filmmaker last year was a young Indigenous woman named Farrah Murdock. Her film was shown at a workshop where this year’s emerging filmmakers each pitched their idea for a film to be created for the 2025 GIFF.
The festival opened with an Icelandic comedy, Grand Finale, by director Sigurjón Kjartansson, shown in the Gimli Unitarian Church – an absolutely fun experience to kick off the five days. It ended on the beach with the fifth blockbuster movie,Paddington 2. In between films, the attendees had the opportunity to attend workshops for filmmakers and extend their learning through listening to the dialogue.
The audience favourite was an Icelandic film about the women’s strike, entitled The Day Iceland Stood Still, by director Pamela Hogan.
It was a magical five days of fantasy, realism, humour, dialogue, and pure escapism.