Director Johnny MaSupplied
Although it might not please sponsors, there is a good argument to be made for renaming this year’s Toronto International Film Festival in honour of Winnipeg.
Never before has the city been so well-represented in the programming, from Matthew Rankin’s comedy Universal Language (which imagines a Winnipeg filtered through the eyes of Tehran, and which was last week selected as Canada’s submission for best international film at the 2025 Oscars) to Rumours, the new “erotico-ministerial techno-thriller” from the city’s most active trio of filmmakers, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson.
Yet sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to capture the energy of a setting in a new light, which is where The Mother and the Bear, from director Johnny Ma (Old Stone, To Live to Sing) comes in. The wry romantic comedy-slash-cosmic fairy tale, which will have its world premiere at TIFF on Friday, follows a South Korean widow (Kim Ho-jung) as she navigates a Winnipeg winter while taking care of her twentysomething daughter, who has slipped into a coma. Ma’s film is all the more remarkable a Winnipeg movie given that the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker had never stepped inside the city before filming.
Ahead of The Mother and the Bear’s TIFF premiere, Ma spoke with The Globe and Mail about his uniquely international love letter to a snow-swept city.
Winnipeg was uncharted territory for you, given that you were living in Shanghai a few years ago, then Mexico City, and originally envisioned this as an American film. What shifted?
I was working with a Chilean company called Fábula run by director Pablo Larraín and his brother Juan de Dios Larraín, and they suggested looking for a Canadian partner. I was skeptical at first, because even though I’m Canadian, I’d never actually shot a film in Canada. I had my own biases regarding Canadian films as an outsider, so I was ready to fight Canadian producer Niv Fichman on whatever location he suggested. But then he mentioned Winnipeg and I thought, well, that’s really interesting. I had long felt that Winnipeg artists produced the most bizarre art. And we had to shoot in the winter, to truly understand the city.
The timing is accidental, but the film speaks to Winnipeg having a moment on the global cinema stage.
It’s funny because the scene there is very small. Matthew Rankin and Guy Maddin were very much in the atmosphere. I rented Matthew’s dad’s apartment while filming there! And I had Evan and Galen Johnson, who are co-producers, living just five minutes away. I needed my Winnipeg whisperers, because I was an outsider making a film about Winnipeg – an opportunity that any Winnipeg filmmaker would love to have. It was my responsibility to not just talk with them but show them that I was willing to work and understand the city. And one thing I learned quickly is that in Winnipeg during the winter, you have to help each other.
Like the scene in which a block of neighbours are performing a kind of synchronized shovelling.
It’s all those little city moments. The script was essentially written while in Winnipeg. I wrote the dramaturgy before I even visited, but once I was in that space, I made it for Winnipeg first and foremost.
Would you say this is also the most “Canadian” film that you’ve ever made, then?
The two features before were all set in China, so I was tapping into a different part of my identity. Come back to North America, I wasn’t trying to make a Canadian film per se, but it is absolutely the most Canadian film ever, and not just for me. It’s an immigrant story, too, and made so through the lens of a Korean character with insight from Chilean filmmakers. There were many layers of perspective.
How did the sensibilities of two sibling filmmaking teams – the Johnsons in Winnipeg and the Larraíns in Chile – contribute to the film?
I did the entire postproduction process in Chile – six months editing there, after five months of prepping and shooting in Winnipeg. Yet they are very similar places, both isolated from the mainstream vibe, and each with very strong seasons. Editing the film in Chile, I was explaining what it feels like to live in Canada and seeing that perspective through their eyes, so that act of translation helped a lot in terms of making sure the audience for this wasn’t just a Winnipeg or Canadian audience, but an international one.
On that international note, this film was inspired by an encounter you had with a widow who owned a hostel in South Korea. Is that why you’ve decided, as a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, to make a Korean-Canadian story?
When I wrote the idea back in 2016, I just saw my mother through this woman. If I could tell my personal stories through her, it made me feel it was just the right thing. Even though I thought people would think I was crazy – why would anyone give me money to make a film in a language that I don’t even speak? But nobody ever asked me to change it to a Chinese character. It’s the same way that I made a film in Winnipeg despite not being from Winnipeg. It felt universal.
The Mother and the Bear screens on Sept. 6, 2:30 p.m. at TIFF and Royal Alexandra Theatre, and Sept. 8, 9:15 p.m., Scotiabank (tiff.net)
This interview has been condensed and edited.