His Winnipeg

Guy Maddin’s unlikely new “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg opens at the SIFF Cinema on June 27^th and runs for just one week.

My Winnipeg was commissioned by Canadian Television as a documentary, and in some ways it is. By all accounts, Winnipeg is a strange place to call home. But according to Maddin’s ironic, deadpan voiceover narration, it’s even stranger than you may have thought. In Maddin’s version of events, the following is true: Winnipeg is home to more sleepwalkers per capita than any other city in the world; the city includes a winter lake that eleven horses rode into, froze to death, and thus became a grotesque park of statues; a makeshift league of old hockey players, some of whom are dead, meets to play in the remains of a decrepit arena; the local Eaton’s department store once held a series of lascivious “Golden Boy Pageants” aimed, delicately, at the city’s homosexual population. And that ain’t all.

Maddin’s city myth fuses with his personal life as he re-creates key events and horrors of his childhood. As the title suggests, My Winnipeg is a personal, idiosyncratic account of an unusual city’s culture and resonance.

Maddin’s singular film technique – using deteriorated film stock and fuzzy visuals that often move slightly into and out of focus – lends itself surprisingly well to the world of Youtube. He has dozens of short films out there, all of them worth the 5 or 6 minutes that they ask. For example, here is Sombra Dolorosa, a four minute mini-epic in which an inconsolable Mexican widow must wrestle Death during a total eclipse. I wish I could post them all. Like his brain, Maddin’s Winnipeg is filled with quiet wonders and antiquated oddities so bizarre that they must be true. Even if they’re not.