The Twentieth Century

Canada, 1899. The young Mackenzie King wants to be prime minister. To that end he enters a competition in which candidates compete at ice skating, clubbing a seal and distance urination. He also cannot disobey his mother, is in love with a nurse and is trying to hide a shoe fetish. The powers running the country keep reminding him of his duty. Matthew Rankin writes and directs in his first feature. The source is a real person. William Lyon Mackenzie King was the longest serving prime minister in Canadian history, and the diaries published after his death revealed that he attended séances and spoke with his dead mother and his dog. The film uses that material directly. The visual language is entirely artificial. The sets are painted, the perspective is deliberately wrong and the colours are saturated; the narrative refers openly to German expressionism and early silent cinema. The subject is national identity. Canada's description of itself as polite, mild and harmless is shown here as an illness, and the satire is aimed directly at that image. It was shot on 16mm on a low budget and became one of the noticed examples of Canadian independent cinema. Who it is for: viewers who like formally extreme comedy and historical satire. Who it is not for: the humour is very particular, most of the references are lost without Canadian history, and the narrative is deliberately strange.