- October 21, 2017
Please join us for an event that celebrates John Paskievich’s photos & films at the Cinematheque!
When: Saturday, October 21, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Cinematheque (100 Arthur Street), Winnipeg.
Cost: $10 (General), $8 (Students and Seniors), $6 (WFG Members)
Featuring the Paskievich/Mirus short Ted Baryluk’s Grocery (1984) alongside Errol Morris’ The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (2016). John Paskievich will introduce the screening.
This special presentation in conjunction with the Flash Photographic Festival and the re-release of Paskievich’s award-winning book of photographs, The North End Revisited, which features 80 new photographs. Signed copies of the book will be available for sale at the screening.
About the Films
Ted Baryluk’s Grocery / Directed by John Paskievich & Michael Mirus, 1984, Canada, 10 min / Best Short Film at the Canadian Genie Awards, this film profiles Ukrainian-Canadian Ted Baryluk, whose grocery store has been a fixture in Winnipeg’s North End for over 20 years.
The B-Side / Directed by Errol Morris, 2016, USA, 76 min / “Errol Morris’s masterful and surprising new film is simplicity itself: a visit to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio of his friend, the 20×24 Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who specifies on her website that she likes her subjects “to wear clothes (and to bring toys, skis, books, tennis racquets, musical instruments, and particularly pets…).” As this charming, articulate, and calmly uncompromising woman takes us through her 50-plus years of remarkable but fragile images of paying customers, commissioned subjects, family, and close friends (including the poet Allen Ginsberg), the sense of time passing grows ever more acute.” —The Film Society of Lincoln Centre
About the Book
Cities and the people who live in them are enduring subjects of photography. Winnipeg’s North End is one of North America’s iconic neighbourhoods, a place where the city’s unique character and politics have been forged. First built when Winnipeg was the ‘Chicago of the North,’ the North End is the great Canadian melting pot, where Indigenous peoples and Old World immigrants cross the boundaries of ethnicity, class, and culture. Like New York’s Lower East Side, the North End is also the place that helped to forge Winnipeg’s political identity of resistance and revolt.
Award-winning filmmaker John Paskievich grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, and for the last forty years he has photographed its people and captured its spirit. Paskievich’s films, many made for the National Film Board of Canada, follow the lives of different outsiders, from Slovakian Roma to stutterers.
The North End Revisited brings together many of the photographs from Paskievich’s now-classic book The North End (2007) with eighty additional images to present a deep and poignant picture of a special community. Texts by art critics Stephen Osborne and Alison Gillmor and film scholar George Melnyk explore the different aspects of Paskievich’s work and add context from Winnipeg’s history and culture.
About John Paskievich
John Paskievich was born in Austria of Ukrainian parents and immigrated to Canada as a young child. He graduated from the University of Winnipeg and studied photography and film at Ryerson University. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published in various periodicals and in several books, including A Voiceless Song: Photographs of the Slavic Lands, introduced by Josef Skvorecky, and A Place Not Our Own. His documentary films have garnered critical praise and won numerous awards. Paskievich lives in Winnipeg.
