ReviewNo Man Can Define Me: The Films of Winston Washington Moxam

It might have been his early experiences as a visible minority that attracted him to the city's margins. Working in the tradition of humanist realism, he passionately addressed issues like poverty, homelessness, racism and social justice.

—Alison Gillmor

The Winnipeg film community remembers one of its own on Friday, February 1.

Cinematheque and the Winnipeg Film Group celebrate the life and work of the late Winston Moxam with a free screening of four of his films, along with the release of a DVD and a new book of interpretive essays.

Moxam was born in England to Jamaican parents and came with his family to Winnipeg in 1971. With a career that spanned from the late 1980s to his sudden, early death in 2011, Moxam was something of an indie spirit, even among indies. While many young local filmmakers were exploring the stylized and the sensational, Moxam tended toward the sincere, straight-up treatment of everyday subjects.

It might have been his early experiences as a visible minority that attracted him to the city's margins. Working in the tradition of humanist realism, he passionately addressed issues like poverty, homelessness, racism and social justice.

In The Barbeque (1993), Moxam takes a satirical "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" approach to polite multicultural Canada. A young African-Canadian woman meets her boyfriend's family and friends for the first time. While everyone at the gathering would undoubtedly declare--like the boyfriend's mom-- that they "don't have a prejudiced bone in [their] body," they all project their racial assumptions onto the girl, in ways both unsettling and comic.   

Sand (1999) is a beautifully-shot black-and-white film--maybe Moxam's best-looking work--in which two African-Canadian soldiers in World War II have been shipwrecked on a remote shore of north Africa. As the two friends speak about preparing to give their lives in the defense of a country that often treats them as second-class citizens, the conversation alternates between idealism and outrage. 

Barbara James (2001), Moxam's first full-length feature, follows a tough-minded Jamaican-Canadian woman whose initial response to an unplanned pregnancy is to plan her own death. Bombarded by advice, mostly unwanted, from friends, from her mother and even from random strangers, she eventually comes to a re-evaluation of her life and its possibilities. The story sometimes seems a bit shambly, but a commanding lead performance from Storma T. McDonald holds things together. 

Moxam often worked with straitened budgets and tricky filming circumstances. His films aren't polished, and sometimes the dialogue can be clunky, the minor actors stiff. What resonates in these works is the urgency of the subjects and the deep commitment of their creator.

Fellow filmmaker and film scholar Matthew Rankin puts it simply and succinctly when he says that Winston made "big-hearted films." And he was a big-hearted man. That's what people will be remembering on Friday night.