My Winnipeg + The Heart of the World

My Winnipeg
Canada 2007. Director: Guy Maddin
Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade

Geriatric hockey figures prominently, frozen horse heads jut surreally out of an iced-over Red River, and scary Ann Savage, femme fatale of the1945 noir classic Detour, plays the director’s hairdresser mother. Guy Maddin’s wondrous My Winnipeg, a free-wheeling, fantastical mock-memoir that couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anyone else’s Winnipeg, was a major critical favourite at home and abroad in ’08, turning up on the Top Ten lists of Film Comment, Time, The Globe and Mail. “A hilarious ‘docu-fantasia’ from one of Canada’s most distinctive directors, My Winnipeg is at once an autobiographical fever dream, a mythopoeic history of Canada’s coldest city (what Maddin calls ‘a city of palimpsests . . . this sleep-walking, working-class town’) and a wacky exercise in ethnography. Holding together its hallucinatory blend of archival footage, animation and skewed re-creation of scenes from Maddin’s childhood is the director’s inspired, entertaining narration. . . Maddin’s transmogrification of the city makes it seem as mysterious and foreign as any of the world’s great metropolises” (James Adams, Globe and Mail) “If you’ve not yet experienced the pleasures of a Maddin film, this is an excellent place to start. . . My Winnipeg is one of his most accessible, funny and oddly pleasurable films to date” (Vancouver I.F.F.). B&W and colour, 35mm. 80 mins.

The Heart of the World
Canada 2000. Director: Guy Maddin 
With: Josef Lebánek, Karel Saudek, Jan Saudek, Alena Karpilová

Commissioned for the Toronto International Film Festival’s 25th anniversary in 2000, Guy Maddin’s faux silent melodrama mixes Metropolis, Murnau and Eisenstein in a mad Kino rush. A mere six minutes in length, The Heart of the World is a breathtaking masterpiece that rivals the director’s finest feature-length work and deserves consideration as one of the best Canadian films ever made. <

em>B&W, 35mm. 6 mins.