With his grimy, hazy visuals, preference for trance-like hypnotic pacing, and undying curiosity about the city’s mechanistic apathy, his works display some of the most authentic depictions of Winnipeg on screen. 

Steel is an up-and-coming multi-disciplinary filmmaker, projectionist and crate digging archivist. He spends most of his time scouring Winnipeg Film Group’s back catalogue for obscure, hazy, or analogue images and films.

At only 26 years old, he’s already impressively accomplished, having collaborated for music videos with artists like Andy Shauf, Begonia, and Living Hour. He’s worked with filmmakers like Grace Glowicki, Rhayne Vermette, and Guy Maddin, and his short films have appeared in festivals across the world. 

Originally from Fort Garry, a neighbourhood in Winnipeg’s southwest, Steel has been perfecting his art since the age of 10. He would shoot action movies with his brother and friends in his backyard, later editing them into little DIY gems using iMovie on his dad’s MacBook. 

When he was 11, he started attending classes organized by The Winnipeg Film Group–an artist-run organization that supports local filmmakers through distribution, production, and education. “I wasn’t even a teenager, and the first class that I took, they just kind of sat down all these kids and just showed them all these Winnipeg indie punk films,” Steel says. 

“I just had my mind completely warped by this,” he continues. “Just because it immediately went from me trying to make The Dark Knight to ‘Oh, I want to make weird Winnipeg stuff.’”

“…it immediately went from me trying to make The Dark Knight to ‘Oh, I want to make weird Winnipeg stuff.’”

— Ryan Steel

His ephemeral short works like Honey Dill Sauce, an experimental hyper-pop fever dream that obsesses over distinctly local dipping sauce, or On The Bus, a pensive, poetic reflection of public transit, fully embrace a peculiar local DIY aesthetic. “That’s the stuff that’s still interesting 50 years later,” he explains. “Where the stuff that’s really just emulating these Hollywood movies just doesn’t hold up.”

Steel’s work eventually landed him a short stint digitizing The Winnipeg Film Group’s archives. For a DIY addict like Steel, giving him unfettered access to almost every experimental local film ever made is kind of like handing a pyromaniac a box of fireworks.

He talks ceaselessly and with great admiration for old indie Winnipeg filmmakers. He describes bizarro VHS tapes where astronauts open up an abandoned movie theatre in the year 3000 and other weird “punk freak-out” films. 

With mind-blowing discoveries of unearthed films taking place near-daily, Steel collected some of these treasures for his latest project, WAY OUT. 

WAY OUT is a showcase of “bizarre comedies, great synth soundtracks, and most of all, dives deep into the under-seen crevices of the Winnipeg Film Group’s archival vault.”

“[I was] looking for the nooks and crannies, stuff that spoke to me and stuff that, aesthetically, was interesting to me. I wanted to make something that you could kind of just zone out to, like weird sounds that you’d never really heard before,” he says.  

It all culminated in a perfect psychedelic event, explicitly designed for and hosted on 4/20. 

Steel is unapologetically inspired by underground local films. He describes “pulling” shots from other DIY filmmakers in his “pastiche” 2022 short film, Late Summer. “One of the cheat codes of being a filmmaker in Winnipeg is we have this language of cinema to pull from that’s so unique and internationally recognized as a cool regional cinema.”

“There’s a lot of people who come here looking to get the Winnipeg magic, and I don’t know if you can tap into it without being from here,” Steel says. “There’s a weird self-loathing as a Winnipegger that I feel like you have to really stew in to get it.”

A still from Portage Place Mall (Provided by Ryan Steel).

Steel’s profound understanding of his environment is beautifully expressed through his 2021 short documentary, Portage Place Mall. Portage Place is a notorious failed experiment to build a functioning mall in the central artery of Winnipeg. For various reasons, the city stopped caring for the mall and the downtown residents who moved through it. It became another victim in a long line of community spaces slowly asphyxiated by the city.

With a mirrorball sheen and a dreamy abstract score, Steel shows off the mall and, in turn, its inhabitants, through a literal rose-tinted lens; recognizing in his neighbours the full dignity, compassion, fallibility and pride he sees in them. 

A shot of a water fountain launches into the sky, and a disembodied voice echoes from a distance: “Make a wish … wish for a better mall.”

These days, Steel is moving away from films specifically about Winnipeg. He’s recently received funding through Telefilm Canada to make his debut feature-length, Meat, set to release in 2026. It’s the next stage in his intentional choice to remove himself from what he calls a “navel-gazey” habit of Winnipeg filmmakers.

Despite that, and whether he likes it or not, all the time he’s spent examining Winnipeg and digging through its film archives has infused the city into the themes present in all of his work: the universality of understanding, the beauty of connection, the thrill of alienation, and the precious pain of love. 

Join Ryan Steel on Sunday, April 20, 2025 at the Black Lodge in Winnipeg, MB for Way Out: Films from the Depths of the Winnipeg Film Group (WFG) Archive! This collection of “out there” films curated by Steel, selected over 6 months, cataloguing ALL of the +1100 films currently in distribution at the WFG.

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