Dump Talk: Dogma Television North of 60

Lost Dominion Screening Collective presents:
Dump Talk Retrospective
Club SAW (67 Nicholas St.) – Tuesday September 18th, 2012, 7:30pm, 75mins
Part of the Canadian Cult Revue III series
Admission is a food or cash donation to the Ottawa Food Bank, cash bar

In the fall of 2001, Yellownkife community cable debuted a new home-grown TV-show filmed largely in the winter in the town's garbage dump. Dump Talk  featured interviews, improvised comedy and documentary vignettes exploring the lifestyle and culture of the largest town in the Northwest Territories. Loosely inspired by the “dogma” filmmaking trend out of Scandinavia, whereby films were produced with the barest of production values, Dump Talk took pride in making a virtue of its minimal-to-non-existent budget. Treasures scavenged in the dump and sold on eBay helped finance production expenses. The talk-show set was constructed and deconstructed each episode out of refuse and recycling found on location. Dump Talk became a "must view, cult hit" for local Yellowknifers, which was probably helped by the fact that it aired right after TV-Bingo.

The show also took some of its inspiration from the halcyon days of Ottawa's community-cable volunteer movement (pre-Rogers corporate slickification), when rough-and-ready genre-bending shows such as the early “Tom Green Show” and “In Your Face!” took comedy to the streets of the city and aired their shows with minimal censorship or corporate interference. Two of Dump Talk's creators, Paul Gordon, and Adam Bowick were Ottawa-raised transplants to the North, and they brought some of that NCR video-pride to the YK. As far as we know, Dump Talk is the only TV-show in Canadian history to be filmed primarily on location in a town dump.

VHS tapes have been passed around, but never has a DVD of Dump Talk been assembled until now. To celebrate the occasion we decided to make a party of it.  Bowick and Gordon will be on hand to introduce the video and answer questions. It should make for a fun evening at Club SAW.

Yellowknifer Article here from Dec 21st 2001