INCIDENT AT PICKEREL FILLET (1991, 16mm, 8.5mins, colour)
Although I’d been writing about film since my days as a reviewer on the University of Winnipeg student newspaper in the late ’70s (and had actually written my first attempts at film scripts in the early ’70s), it was only after several years of working in retail that I finally responded to a friend’s urging to join the Winnipeg Film Group and make a film of my own. Years of criticizing other people’s work make one nervous about embarking on that kind of journey, so I tried to hedge my bets in a number of ways: obviously, the first thing was to work with a group of family and friends who would look on it as a bit of fun. Next, I conceived the project as a comedy (trying to avoid the pitfalls of student-film pretension) and decided to make it a documentary parody (documentary makes allowances for any number of technical shortcomings that would be less forgivable in a drama). The result, more than a year in the making, was an 8-minute short called Incident at Pickerel Fillet, which premiered in 1991.
Festivals: ConText, Edmonton AB; Plains Conference, Edmonton; Vancouver International Film Festival; Northern Lights Film Festival, Yellowknife; Brandon Film Festival; Great Plains Film Festival (in competition), Lincoln NE; KeyCon, Winnipeg; New York Mills Film Festival, Minnesota
Television: Prairie Filmmakers IV, Prairie Public Television, North Dakota; “Eat Carpet”, SBS-TV, Australia; “Open Wide”, CBC-TV Manitoba; Space–the Imagination Station, Canada
