The North End

Award-winning documentary maker John Paskievich has made his name making films about places and people throughout the world. As the film reviewer for the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote, Paskievich does not deal so much with people who fall between the cracks as stand astride them. His films have chronicled young Czechs trying to be North American Indians, the Roma community in Slovakia, a group of Inuit sculptors in the far North, and an isolated group of Orthodox Russians on the Canadian prairies. As a filmmaker, his work has been shown at film festivals throughout the world, including the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto Festival of Festivals. In The North End, Paskievich returns to his first love, photography. His lyrical black-and-white photographs chronicle a community closer to home, the iconic Winnipeg neighborhood in which he grew up. Winnipeg's North End is the great Canadian melting pot, the place "north of the tracks" that welcomed waves of immigrants from central and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. It is a place that spawned some of Canada's greatest cultural and political events and personalities. Over the last forty years, it has also become a place in which Old World immigrants and their descendants mingle uneasily with a new wave of immigration of Aboriginal Canadians. Paskievich's black-and-white photographs capture the vibrancy and conflicts of the North End and other urban spaces like it, places where history, poverty, and resilience come together.Paskievich, John is the author of 'The North End', published 2007 under ISBN 9780887557002 and ISBN 0887557007.