Matthew Rankin
Bridgeport, January 17, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, the film will explore the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.
1987: While the other students wonder if new kid Robin is a boy or a girl, Robin forges a complicated bond with the school bully, making increasingly dangerous choices to fit in.
Matthew spends Mother’s Day in his mom’s house slowly deleting her voicemails.
Toronto, Canada, 1899. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950) fervently believes that he is destined to become Prime Minister, but to do so he will first have to fight his personal obsessions and overcome the many obstacles he will encounter on his tortuous path to power.
New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to J.P. Morgan, his onetime benefactor.
This micro-epic short film is an inspired tribute to visionary avant-garde composer Walter Boudreau: his life, work, mischief, and boundless artistic curiosity. Both a documentary biopic and a wildly abstract hallucination, the film conceives of Walter Boudreau as a radical explorer, struggling against the inert mass of the cosmos, charting bold new paths of artistic freedom and audaciously expanding the frontiers of our known musical universe.
In the idealism and mutation of his home town of Winnipeg, the filmmaker Matthew Rankin launches a failed campaign of absolute inter-human solidarity entirely in Esperanto, the artificial language of world peace.
A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). Combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing letratone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.
In the aftermath of the 1950 Winnipeg flood, Fernand floats listlessly through the sad, sunken landscape of ruin. His estranged wife prays for the drowned souls of Saint-Boniface.
An examination of Rory Lepine, who sent Winnipeg into a frenzy when he beat local legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a 7-Eleven in 1985
Cattle Call is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, cut-outs, open-exposures, hole-punching and rubbing lettraset directly on the celluloid) filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have created images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctioneering itself. This hallucinogenic study of what Werner Herzog has termed the poetry of capitalism.
Self-portrait of the filmmaker seen through the mystical postmodern prism of Iranian cinema
Winnipeg Film Group. Deep in the winter of 1986. Guy Maddin is in the process of filming Tales from the Gimli Hospital and needs to rub a dead seagull on somebody's chest. Immediately, Dave Barber agrees, submitting his bare flesh to Maddin's road kill and to film history. (This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group'ss Cinematheque for its 25th anniversary, Silverscope)
Only the electrifying courage and love of Québec nationalism can save the citizens of Winnipeg from committing mass suicide.
On the 25th anniversary of his employment, Dave Barber, the visionary workaholic programmer of Winnipeg's beloved Cinematheque, dies tragically in an avalanche of VHS tapes while working late to finish the programming calendar. His workaholic ghost returns to the land of the living to finish the calendar and haunt the Cinematheque by night.
A found footage video essay tracing Winnipeg's civic pathologies, aesthetic fabulations and exquisite strangeness through the prism of its own low-budget, lo-fi TV advertising produced between 1975 and 1992.
On a moonlit street corner, a Parisian waif sits dejectedly on a doorstep, mournfully clutching a dogless leash.
Artistic rivalry infects the Winnipeg public service. Strong words are uttered, regretted, retracted.
