After having her work screened at film festivals in North America, Europe and Australia over the last two years, local filmmaker Rhayne Vermette is helping Winnipeg to keep its reputation as a hotbed for experimental film.

The 31 year-old says she started showing an interest in filmmaking when she was studying architecture at the University of Manitoba.

“I just started doing stop motion animation with the models I was making for class and that’s basically how I got into it,” Vermette says. “I took a leave of absence in the last year of my masters [degree] to focus on my film projects and I haven’t gone back, though I might still one day.”

Vermette released her first film in 2009 and the next year she followed it up with R. Seymore Goes North, which she made for the Winnipeg Film Group’s 48 Hour Film Contest.

“Looking back, that film is pretty menial, but they [Winnipeg Film Group] liked it and were interested in distributing it, which was the first time I really started thinking about getting my work out there,” she says.

Since then, Vermette has released around nine films. Among them, one piece that’s garnered lots of attention is Tudor Village: A One Shot Deal. Released in 2012, the film collages together found footage, animation and 16mm footage.

In the picture, Vermette creates a narrative surrounding the Tudor Village rental complex that exists in the south end of Winnipeg, not too far away from the University of Manitoba.

So far the film has been screened at 13 festivals, some of which are based as far away as Barcelona, Spain and Melbourne, Australia.

In September, Tudor Village even won the Jury Prize for Best Prairie Work at WNDX, Winnipeg’s annual experimental film festival.

Recently, Vermette made her music video debut when she put together a clip for “They Said” by The Lytics, a song off the Winnipeg hip hop group’s latest album They Told Me.

“We did it on one of the coldest days of the month and most of the footage was shot from the back of a truck in the North End,” she recalls.

Aside from making movies, Vermette is interested in photography and last month she assembled an exhibit called Methods, which was shown at the FRAME Arts Warehouse during Nuit Blanche.

“It was mostly just me playing with analog toy cameras,” she says. “The whole conceptual approach to assembling the exhibition was trying to make use of broken, improper portraits of these architectural artifacts found amongst Manitoba.”

Vermette plans to keep on creating. She’s been working on a 10-minute documentary called Rob What, which features possibly the most constant fixture in the Winnipeg arts scene in the last decade, local actor/DJ/musician Rob Vilar.

Vermette says the doc will be released in early 2014 through MTS TV’s Stories from Home.

“It’s sort of about him [Vilar],” she says. “But there’s more of an unconventional approach and he’s mostly used as a lens.”

Published in Volume 68, Number 8 of The Uniter (October 23, 2013)