A World Away: Stories from the Regina Five 2001
A World Away was my first broadcast documentary. The projects I’d done up until then had been creatively satisfying, but you don’t make money on short films, and I was growing weary of sharing a house with three other people, and eating a bagel for lunch.
Growing up in Regina, I’d been vaguely aware there had been a group of painters there in the early 1960s who’d received national attention, and had some connections to major artists and critics in New York City. There was also an iconic picture of them that made them look a bit like gangsters. When I thought of doing a documentary to try and make a living as an independent filmmaker, I thought the so-called Regina Five might be a good story to look into.
Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery was putting together a retrospective of one of the “five” painters Arthur McKay and I learned that all of his colleagues we’re going to be in Regina for the opening. I was living in Toronto at the time, and I booked a flight to Regina and arranged to get some cameras and friends to operate them to shoot the opening night when all the painters were doing a round table conversation moderated by curator Timothy Long. It was a really good night.
I returned to Toronto with some footage and initial introductions to the five, and I set about trying to raise enough money to make the film. I received funding from the Canada Council, and the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, and was able to secure broadcast pre-licenses from Bravo! (at the time a channel focused on arts programming) and the late, lamented Saskatchewan Communications Network (SCN). Regina producer Gail Tilson provided some valuable help as I was starting out.
I went to B.C. to interview Douglas Morton, Art McKay and the art historian Dr. John O’Brian, to Calgary to interview Ted Godwin (who took me fly fishing), and Ron Bloore was in Toronto, as was I. I have particularly fond memories of talking to Ken Lochhead at his cottage in the Gatineaus, where Ken made sandwiches. I also got to interview Dr. William Riddell, then in his early 90s and sharp as a tack. Dr. Riddell had hired Ken Lochhead to start the art program at Regina College, which over the decades evolved into the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.
Although the budget was tight, technology change had led to miniDV cameras that were capable of shooting “broadcast quality” images, at a fraction of the cost of their predecessors,and I used one of those cameras for most of the shoots. Editor Katharine Asals and I cut the film on her Final Cut Pro 1.0. The final render and output took about a day. Former Reginian Maury Lafoy put together some wonderful music for the film.
Before I was able to finish the film, Art McKay and Dr. William Riddell had died. Within a few years of finishing the film, Ted Godwin was the only one of the five still with us. Ted died in 2013.
A World Away: Stories from the Regina Five had its broadcast debut on Bravo! in 2001, and subsequently aired on SCN. I was able to sell VHS copies to public libraries and school boards across Canada, and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education purchased rights to include it in the curriculum.
Perhaps a decade after I completed the film, the MacKenzie Art Gallery did an exhibition on the legacy of the Regina Five. They screened A World Away and commissioned Dakota McFadzean to illustrate audio excerpts from the film. Dakota had been in the first Film course I ever taught, and though I never met him one-on-one during the class (because there were over 100 students in it), I remembered his name because he received the highest grade. In 2025 I worked with Dakota’s partner Laura Pfeiffer on Project Pedestrian.
48 minutes. Standard Definition Video.
