Tales from the Gimli Hospital, And Other Canadian Films on the Road to 4K Recovery
By Liam Lacey
Winnipeg director Guy Maddin’s first feature film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, still holds up as one of the most weirdly ingenious films released in Canada or anywhere else.
Shot in 16mm black and white, with a mixture of sound and inter-titles, the 63-minute film was presented as a faux artifact from the early decades of the last century, a densely inventive, antique campy fever-dream that was also food-spittingly funny. No wonder It became a cult hit, running for a full year at the Quad theatre in New York as a midnight movie.
Guy Maddin’s archly anachronistic Tales from the Gimli Hospital.
Resistant to synopsis, Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a movie of textures and jokes and tone shifts that must be experienced. And fortunately, now it can be, in a newly restored 4K digitalized version for both Canadian and international audiences.
This is such a rare event for a Canadian film that it makes you wonder: How did this happen and why doesn’t it happen more often?
Gimli’s rebirth is courtesy of Ron Mann’s Sphinx Pictures, in conjunction with the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and a relatively new initiative by Telefilm Canada. Mann has been involved in film preservation for more than 20 years, forming his distribution company, Films We Like, to make available both his own documentaries and restored versions of other Canadian films, including Phillip Borsos’ The Grey Fox (1982) and Bruce McDonald’s Roadkill (1982).
The Gimli release is part of a broader movement to respond to the streaming era to make such films available to the public again. In July, 2021, Telefilm initially announced a plan to restore and re-release several Canadian films, under the title Canadian Cinema — Re-ignited.
The original announcement was full of accolades for Canadian cinema and short on details: A handful of films would be chosen for second lives by four organizations: Three film festivals, The Toronto International Film Festival and Hot Docs, and Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC), along with the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, the national industry organization behind the Canadian Screen Awards.
Hot Docs picked three films, co-directed by Holly Dale and Janis Cole: P4W: Prison for Women (1981), Hookers on Davie (1984) and Calling the Shots (1988). FNC chose West of Pluto (À l’ouest de Pluton) by Myriam Verreault and Henry Bernadet, and Philippe Falardeau’s first feature from 2000, The Left-Hand Side of the Fridge (La moitié gauche du frigo).
TIFF picked Tales from the Gimli Hospital, which had its restored version premiere at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television is apparently still chasing down a title, and so far, has produced a trailer for a podcast, Canadian Cinema — Re-Ignited.
I spoke with Francesca Accinelli, the Interim Executive Director and CEO of Telefilm about how this is intended to work. The project, she acknowledged, was somewhat ad hoc, a first step for something she hopes will become bigger and more comprehensive: Each organization was given $135,000 to restore or digitalize as many films they could afford and deemed important.
The organizations, says Accinelli, were encouraged to “create their own framework and their own criteria on what they felt were the best processes to discover the films and which were the right films to restore and digitize.” There were general guidelines about including equity and diversity of communities and region — and the finished films should be made available to the public in either streaming or theatrical form.
Accinelli describes the preservation of Canadian films as “a passion project” which is, of necessity, secondary to Telefilm’s business of producing new Canadian film and television. In the future, she said, she hopes the process can be broader, with any group submitting applications for films for digitalization or restoration.
She points out that film Telefilm has already been involved with other partnerships focusing on film restoration and digitalization . Since 2017, there’s been EncorePlus, a free YouTube channel financed by The Canadian Media Fund (along with Google, Bell, Telefilm, and Deluxe Toronto labs), with more than 900 television episodes, shorts and features, including a number of remastered films, from Jeremy Podeswa’s Eclipse, Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, and New Waterford Girl.
Another partner is Éléphant: memoire de cinema du Quebec (Memory of Quebec Cinema), a philanthropic project originated by Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau in 2008, to digitalize and restore all of Quebec’s feature films, which so far has made about 250 titles available via video on demand, and festival and theatrical screenings.
The National Film Board of Canada led the way in 2008-2009, focusing on digitalizing part of its catalogue for maximum distribution, making 4,000 free movies on its website with another 5,200 on its educational platform, Campus.
Given the patchwork nature of film preservation, and the opportunities to jump into streaming services, there’s some urgency to co-ordinate these digitalization and restoration efforts for Canadian film. The restoration and digitizing of Canadian film was the subject of a wide-ranging recent study , New Light on Canadian Heritage Film, in partnership between the Ottawa’s Canadian Film Institute and the cultural service of the French Embassy in Canada. To summarize, there’s a lot of preservation, restoration and digitalization going on across the country by private and public institutions, but it’s not merit-based or comprehensive.
“It’s clear there are so many different players in the industry and in academic world,” says Accinelli, “and we’re coming together to say, ‘Hey, this is really important — and we must do this all together.”
CLICK HERE to read Liam Lacey’s interview with Guy Maddin about the history of Tales from the Gimli Hospital.
Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux: TIFF Bell Lightbox, Sept. 30-Oct 6; Static Cinema Festival (Australia) Sept. 30-Oct.6; Cinéma Moderne Montreal (Oct. 5-Oct. 11), The IFC Centre, New York (Oct. 14). The American Cinematheque, Los Angeles (Oct. 16). Tales from the Gimli Hospital Redux debuts on Hollywood Suite Nov. 9.