My Winnipeg

The director is trying to leave the city where he was born and cannot. The film is built as a train journey: the narrator describes Winnipeg between sleep and waking. The history of the city, his own family, their houses, the hockey arena and horses that died in a frozen river are folded together. Some of what is described is true, some invented, and the film does not say which is which. Guy Maddin directs. He named the form himself: not a documentary but a docu fantasy. The image is black and white, heavily grained, and imitates the manner of silent cinema; intertitles, accelerated motion and handmade transitions are used. For part of the film Maddin rents his own childhood house and has actors play his family; the woman playing his mother is a veteran of Canadian cinema. The subject is how a bond with a city becomes a trap. Maddin damns the place and cannot leave it. Some of the events described are real: the horses' heads in the frozen river, the demolished hockey arena and the strange local history of the city. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental documentary and formal games. Who it is not for: there is no narrative, the structure is scattered, and because the film plays constantly with truth it will mislead a viewer looking for information.