Sat, Jan 30 / 3 pm
Directed by Mina Shum
2015, Canada, 81 min
Over four decades after the infamous Sir George Williams Riot of February 1969, when a protest against institutional racism snowballed into a 14-day student occupation at the Montreal University, the film reopens the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations and one of the most contested episodes in the nation’s history. Making an audacious foray into non-fiction, the filmmaker engages the original protagonists in a compassionate cinematic exercise of reckoning and redemption.
Gerry Atwell is a multi-disciplinary artist and has worked professionally as a musician, screenwriter, TV producer, art Curator and arts administrator. As a musician, Gerry won a Juno Award with the band Eagle & Hawk. He is currently Chair of the St. Norbert Arts Centre and sits on the board of Plug In Contemporary Art Institute and is the co founder of Art Kitchen Inc, a new youth arts organization that serves the Selkirk Avenue community in North End Winnipeg. He will be in conversation with Winnipeg lawyer Zilla Jones.
Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg lawyer and artist. As a lawyer, she practices human rights, criminal defence, immigration and child protection law with her firm Jones Law Office,
with a particular interest in racial profiling and discrimination cases. As a singer, she has performed with numerous groups including Manitoba Opera and The Opera Project. She is currently working on her first novel, which discusses the events surrounding the revolution and coup in Grenada,West Indies in the 1970s and 80s. Zilla’s life was impacted by the events shown in The Ninth Floor, as they caused her grandmother
to refuse to send her mother to university in Canada.
*Women in Film Artistic Merit Award, Vancouver International Film Festival
Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival is generously sponsored by IATSE 856 and Radio Canada Manitoba.
