Cover photo: Film maker Lydia Venema, who grew up in Wolseley, at the launch of her first film Sweetwater at the 2025 GIFF. Photo by Terese Taylor
Lydia Venema remembers always being creative, and using almost anything she could get her hands on to set up a story.
“I would make videos of my American girl dolls,” she says, “I and was kind of miserable to be around sometimes because I would just tell my friends, okay, we’re making a movie and I’m directing you all.”
“Everyone has a camera these days, so it’s not hard to get your hands on something,” she says.
Venema launched her first film, Sweetwater, at the Gimli Film Festival, after launching a go-fund-me appeal, raising about $5000 to put into her first project, and just graduating from media production program at Toronto Metropolitan University. “So maybe try not to be as bossy as I was,” she kids, “but just make things.”
Venema’s film about a young lesbian couple who are deciding whether or not to go to San Francisco was entered in the Short Films Competition, with stiff competition against other local film makers taking a huge variety of creative approaches to their film work, and with actor Kris Cahatol, in competing film griePH, about a non-binary character unable to express a deep loss, winning the ACTRA Manitoba Best Performance Award (along with Gail Maurice for her role in Aberdeen.)
A comedy gem appeared in Museum of Lost Boys at The Manitoba Museum, where an old-want-to-be-pirate, takes a new young want-to-be-pirate through the emotional world of his family’s turmoil while he decides whether the museum’s recognizable displays will become his new home. Catherine Dulude won the Best Manitoba Short Award for Petit Mollusque, an animated feature she created with students in a Sisler High School film program, about “the joy and fear of a pregnancy, after experiencing a perinatal loss.”
The RBC Emerging Filmmaker Pitch Competition packed the Gimli Theatre, with intense three minute presentations hawking their ideas, and questions afterwards from the judges.
Ande Brown, a trans man, made a splash about the process of opening up to the experience of being comfortable in their new identity with humour, trepidation, and joy, and pitching to create the third film Half Naked in a trilogy (Better Late Than Never, and First Shave) about their life, taking the $15,000 award.
Another exciting display of talent was in the The 48 Hour Film Festival showing at the GIFF of 18 three minute maximum films organized by 48 Hour festival founder Ben Williams. Besides keeping the audience on the edge of their seats for its comedic relief, and a fantastic invitation to develop outstanding creativity, Williams announced that instead of working with TIFF, he is hoping to bring the national 48 Hour competition to Winnipeg.
Special awards from the Gimli Film Festival included the Canada Media Fund Best Canadian Short Award winner for Lumen, the Barry Lank Award to Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan for The Fruit Machine: A Space Opera, the Manitoba Film & Music Best Manitoba Film Award, and Director Guild of Canada – Manitoba award for Best Manitoba Director to Noam Gonick for Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance, the New Voices Award to Amber Fares for Coexistence, My Ass!, APTN Indigenous Spirit Award to Sinakson Trevor Solway for Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man, and both the international Alda Award, and Grand Jury ‘Best of Fest’ Award to Matthew Rankin for Universal Language. The Audience Choice Award went to Bob Trevino Likes It, a film starring John Leguizamo.
