Students created 60-second films portraying seven Winnipeg neighbourhoods guided by prompts from Richard Weller’s 2024 publication, To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century. The prompts — Paradise, Utopia, Machine, Monster, Ruin, and Instrument — offer a taxonomy of landscape and urban forms tied to indicators of Anthropocene stress. This framework connects climate concerns with conceptual exploration, providing a critical lens for understanding cities today.

Using these prompts alongside film-based storytelling techniques, students examine neighbourhoods as both tangible and intangible entities shaped by form, perception, and myth. The films explore how the neighbourhood, its parts, or specific elements of its communities, architecture, landscape, or infrastructure embody aspects of the archetypes, creating insightful neighbourhood portrayals.

The films were screened at Winnipeg’s Nuit Blanche festival on September 28, 2024, in collaboration with Storefront Manitoba and at the venue of the Community Design & Planning Centre. The studio is a collaboration between Leanne Muir and Lawrence Bird.

Films by Akshay Nair, Akshansh Sood, Alyaa Kabbani, Ana Ortiz Rosero, Dilumi Rajamanthri, Elia Nikkel, Isaac Dima, Jasper Eung, Jamie Chow, Jory Thomas, Julia Rendulic, Justin Almonte, Karen Servidad, Kiara Dell’Acqua, Lealyn Carlos, Maya Hopkins, Mia Nichol, Nigel Musara, Rachel McKiel, Sean Stephens, Shiza Jawed, Tristan Thompson.

// October 2024