Mulroney satire wins WIFF Prize at Windsor festival

Matthew Rankin's Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney won the WIFF Prize in Canadian Film at the Windsor International Film Festival on Sunday, November 1, becoming the first documentary to take the festival honour. Rankin accepted the award at a private reception attended by representatives of the nominated films, jury members and guests, according to the festival, and the winning film will screen free of charge on Monday, November 2 at the Armouries' Sheehan Hall in Windsor.

The prize carries a cash award of twenty-five thousand dollars for the director. All ten nominated films screened during the festival's opening weekend, and the winner was chosen by a jury of industry professionals: filmmaker Michael Mabbott, film critics Chris Knight and Rachel Ho, Mongrel Media marketing vice-president Danish Vahidy, and actress and filmmaker Barbara Ulrich. Mabbott served as jury president.

In a statement, the jury praised the film for its "absolute originality" and "uniquely Canadian voice". The jurors described Rankin's work as a political satire that plays like a political thriller and said it refuses conventional biopic tropes while painting an evocative picture of the past from shared iconography and soundscapes. They also singled out archive producer Marika Lapointe, whose work drew on eighty thousand pieces of archival material to build what the jury called a beautiful fever dream.

Vincent Georgie, the festival's executive director and chief programmer, said the opening weekend had celebrated the nominated films and thanked the jury for its work. He described Rankin's film as thought-provoking and brain-breaking in remarks reported by the festival.

A collage built from the archive

The film is a National Film Board of Canada production that charts the rise of Brian Mulroney, the boy from Baie-Comeau who became Canada's eighteenth prime minister and led the country through the late twentieth century. Rankin builds the story from archival footage, animation, fabricated graphics and staged passages, remixing television clips, audio textures and video formats into a collage that follows Mulroney from a failed leadership bid in 1976 to his election victory in 1984.

The approach has already found an audience beyond Windsor. The feature, which runs for one hundred and five minutes, premiered in the Midnight Madness programme at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and won the People's Choice Midnight Madness Award there. The National Film Board presented it as the headline title in a lineup of six feature documentaries at Windsor, according to a federal announcement, with the festival running from October 29 through November 8.

Rankin, a Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based filmmaker, studied Quebec history at McGill University and Université Laval. His earlier features include The Twentieth Century, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and Universal Language, which took the audience award at Cannes and the Best Canadian Discovery Award at Toronto. The Mulroney film began at the National Film Board as a documentary series project before taking shape as a single feature.

What happens next at the festival

The other nominees in Windsor were Ba's Book, directed by Ashley Duong; Haunted, directed by Rafaël Ouellet; Julián, directed by Louise Bagnall; Nekai Walks, directed by Rico King; Neverman, directed by Rodrigo Barriuso; Nina Roza, directed by Geneviève Dulude-Decelles; Pauline, directed by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette; Run Terry Run, directed by Sean Menard; and You Will Be Free, directed by Bachir Bensaddek. Last year's winner was Montreal, My Beautiful, directed by Xiaodan He.

The free screening on Monday gives Windsor audiences a second chance to see the winning film in a hall setting after the private reception where the award was announced. Rankin told the reception audience that festivals like Windsor build community around films and that cultural institutions such as the National Film Board make work of this kind possible, according to POV Magazine. The festival continues through the week, with the Mulroney film's win putting a satirical documentary at the centre of its Canadian programme. Further details on the award are available from the Windsor International Film Festival, and background on the film's festival run is available from the National Film Board of Canada.