Greg Hanec's Downtime, circa 1985
by Aaron Zeghers | Published on Cineflyer | Oct 2, 2012 / revised Feb 21, 2025

With the DVD release of Greg Hanec’s Downtime only a few weeks away, I thought it was high time I published these couple Downtime clippings that were passed on to me from the desk drawer of Winnipeg Cinematheque programmer Dave Barber.

The picture above is a Cinematheque advertisement created for a midnight screening of Downtime when the film was first released. It features a high-contrast version of the trademark image — from the same original image that will appear on the Downtime DVD cover, available at the DVD release on October 18th at 7PM at the Winnipeg Cinematheque.

Below is a review of Downtime from City Magazine’s Melissa Steele in the fall of 1985. Steele, for the most part, makes an interesting and critical assessment of Downtime, aptly boiling it down to a story about regular people that are “imprisoned by a suffocating cycle of boredom and isolation.” She continues to praise Downtime as a great achievement for first-time filmmaker Hanec, and for the all-amateur cast.

Steele claims Hanec’s Downtime to be an urban version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1962 novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Despite the vague similarities in pacing, the characters in Downtime are far from the tyrannical hardships of a 1950s soviet labour camp. They drift through life, working at jobs that neither discomfort them nor invigorate them. They lackadaisically live their lives that certainly aren’t hard, just boring. Perhaps saying that Downtime is a first world version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich would be more apt. Even more apt would have been drawing comparisons to Hanec’s contemporary Jim Jarmusch, specifically his early works Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise, which employ a strikingly similar aesthetic and sentimentality despite the fact that Hanec was not able to see either until after Downtime’s completion in 1985.

My personal favourite part of the article comes at the end, when we see Greg’s do-or-die attitude as an artist fully illustrated. “If I can’t make it in filmmaking, I don’t think I should go make sitcoms. I’ll go and be a cook in some restaurant or something,” says Hanec.

In her review, Steele attacks the editing of Downtime, specifically the inconsistent nature of the fade outs and cuts. Although I am not sure, I would guess that these inconsistencies were more likely a constrain of the $16,000 price tag of the film than anything. The good news is, since the new DVD was restored from the original negatives, the fades and cuts had to be re-applied by yours truly. As Greg and I re-assembled the film from the HD transfer, we were forced (the transfer had no fade outs) to reassess some of the fades as well as colour correction, with the result being a more succinct, more vivid, tighter edit than ever seen before.

A Kenneth Goodwin writes here more recently, Hanec's Downtime is an early masterpiece in the long and tortured tradition of low-budget, DIY outsider cinema of Winnipeg.

"Downtime was made in the mid-’80s, the first feature produced by a member of the Winnipeg Film Group. It was made for a paltry $16,000 against the disbelief and even derision of Hanec’s fellow WFG members, who believed that you had to work your way up arduously through various stages from short films to gradually longer ones before you’d earned the right to make a feature. Hanec and co-creator Mitch Brown (who wrote the script and co-edited) saw no reason to wait and the result was a stark, surprisingly funny urban nightmare which was invited to the 1986 Berlin Film Festival (the first film from Manitoba ever screened there)."

Downtime paints a portrait that is enduringly "Winnipeg", and it's rippling echoes can be felt in the cinema from Canada's murder capital in the years to come, from Ryan McKenna's The First Winter to Terrance Odette's Heater.

When asked to describe Winnipeg, I often regale my curious listeners with the description of a scene from Downtime. One of the main characters of the film, I explain, finally works up the courage to ask out the other one, suggesting they go to a party. On that fateful day, another friend tags along to make an awkward, disaffected threesome. In tense silence, they get ready and head out the door. They drive across the barren snow-swept Winnipeg landscape to arrive at the front door of a small bungalow - no lights, no people, no sign of life. After incessantly knocking on the door, an old man peers through the window and waves at them with every indication of: "Go away!" With no better idea, Hanec's characters decide to embark on an age-old Winnipeg tradition: they drive around looking for the party. To no avail. I proclaim to my enraptured listeners, "Sounds like Winnipeg to me!"

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