Film Description
| MY WINNIPEG | ||
| Director: | Guy Maddin |  |
| Country: | Canada | |
| Year: | 2007 | |
| Language: | English | |
| Runtime: | 80 minutes | |
| Rating: | 14A | |
| Principal Cast: | Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Darcy Fehr, Amy Stewart | |
| Trailer: | View the trailer for this film | |
| SCREENING TIMES | |||
| Saturday, November 8 | 3:30 PM & 6:30 PM |
Art Gallery of WindsorDay | |
Winner: 2007 Best Canadian Feature Film - Toronto International Film Festival
With his latest work, My Winnipeg, iconoclastic filmmaker Guy Maddin continues in the freewheeling, genre-bending tradition that has made him one of Canada's most consistently intriguing and internationally respected artists. But even his devoted fans may be surprised by the nature of his most recent film: a documentary (or "docu-fantasia," as he describes it) about his hometown. Equal parts mystical rumination and personal history, city chronicle and deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy, My Winnipeg - which is framed as a goodbye letter - blends local myth with childhood trauma. Somehow, it all feels seamlessly assembled, utterly if perversely logical.
Maddin splits the film into three different strands. The first boasts overlapping, dream-like images of people on trains (a kielbasa floats through several scenes, suspended from the ceiling), consciously echoing the work of the great Soviet avant-garde documentarian and polemicist, Dziga Vertov. The narration ponders why Winnipeggers seem so sleepy and why the place boasts the most sleepwalkers per capita of any city in the world. Maddin proffers a variety of explanations: myths, pseudo-scientific theories and probably pure conjecture.
The second thread offers a whirlwind tour of key moments in the city's history (sometimes depicted via shadow puppets), from well-known events like the Winnipeg General Strike and the loss of the Winnipeg Jets, to far more obscure scandals like the Golden Boy pageants and a racetrack tragedy that left numerous horses encased in ice for the duration of the winter. The third, and possibly the most memorable strand, features re-enactments of pivotal, sometimes traumatic, scenes from Maddin's childhood, which are presented with the feverish awkwardness of a William Castle movie.
As the film proceeds and the local and personal stories pile up, with Maddin's tone oscillating between authoritative (in the philosophical sequences) and hysterically churlish (usually toward his mother), My Winnipeg morphs into a meditation on belief and truth, memory and myth. Is local myth really more suspect than personal memory? And if something has become a myth, doesn't that make it true on some, possibly deeper, level? In one of the more naked moments in the film, Maddin addresses the issue of belief and faith: he believes these things, so why shouldn't we? A deliriously layered provocation, My Winnipeg is outrageous, informative and wildly entertaining.
Steve Gravestock
© 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Group.
