Winnipeg Free Press: CTV flexes corporate muscle…

Winnipeg Free Press: CTV flexes corporate muscle, local film drops out of T.O. fest
Morley Walker

GOOD news, folks. A Winnipeg arts event in Toronto at the end of the month has its first official controversy.
And it’s a contentious one, playing to the current debate over federal copyright legislation and the eternal battle over freedom of expression.
A locally made satiric film, Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets, has been yanked from the Harbourfront Centre’s ambitious From the Peg! festival slated for July 28-30.

According to yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the “video-opera collage” has been “withdrawn” because CTV officials complained that the filmmakers had not requested permission to use old CTV news footage, which makes up about 10 minutes of the 60-minute production.
The irony here is that the footage in question, all from the 1980s, had been destined for the dumpster as the Winnipeg CTV affiliate prepared to move to downtown from Polo Park.
A CTV employee actually phoned the filmmakers in March 2005 with the suggestion that they cart off the reels for potential future use instead of losing them to the garbage bins.
A bigger irony, of course, is that by employing its heavy-handed tactics, CTV is doing to Death by Popcorn exactly what the filmmakers argue happened to our NHL team.
“Our whole movie was about how corporate interests removed the Jets from Winnipeg,” the Globe quotes Matthew Rankin, the spokesman for L’Atelier national du Manitoba filmmaking collective, as saying. “Now, corporate imperatives may remove our movie.”
(A smaller irony: The Globe and CTV are owned by the same Canadian conglomerate, Bell Globemedia.)
A Harbourfront spokesman reached yesterday emphasized that the filmmakers themselves opted to pull their film from the program, which still features another 42 titles.
“It’s not coming from us,” said Bill Bobek, representing the three-day culture fest involving dozens of Winnipeg’s top performing artists.
“We don’t censor.”
The Globe said that CTV has asked Rankin to destroy the film. “They didn’t receive written permission to use our material,” CTV Winnipeg operations manager Ken Peron is quoted as saying.
Death by Popcorn, by the way, had its premiere last December at the Winnipeg Film Group’s Cinematheque. The satire screened to large and enthusiastic audiences and received much media attention.
Winnipeg Free Press movie writer Randall King called it a “twisted epic narrative.” Sportswriter Tim Campbell said that the movie plays “fast and loose with the truth… in the good cause of focusing laughter at ourselves.”
Rankin and his Atelier cohorts, among them Walter Forsberg, Mike Maryniuk and Andreas Goldfuss, have become Winnipeg’s new sultans of subversion.
Their previous film, Garbage Hill, argued that Winnipeg’s authentic broadcast culture of Videon community access television, with the likes of Hunky Bill and Natalie Pollock, has been replaced by the sanitized imagery of corporate cable.
They’re currently making a documentary about Winnipeg’s obsession with local icon Burton Cummings. Last summer, in the wake of the Bears on Broadway display, they mounted a sneaky public art campaign, featuring photos of prominent citizens under the words “murder capital,” to protest the same subject, the “murdering” of our local landmarks.
As they said in a statement: “Winnipeg has tried to negate its own identity for too long, vandalizing our streets with banal and soulless objects.”
Their current battle with CTV over Death By Popcorn has found an ally in the B.C.-based Appropriation Art coalition.

This arts lobby group, which has been validated by top arts professionals across the country, issued an open letter in the spring calling on the federal government not to cave in to corporate pressures to draft stringent new copyright legislation.

“We have a climate fraught with uncertainty,” spokeswoman Sarah Joyce said. “We think this is a crisis.”

It may, in fact, be a crisis when a major media organization, which thrives on the fresh air of free expression, tries to stifle relatively powerless independent filmmakers.

CTV should back off right now and let Rankin and colleagues screen their movie in Toronto.
Do they want From the Peg! to morph into a national cause célèbre, with them as the bad guys?