From Jurgen Fauth & Marcy Dermansky,
Your Guide to World / Independent Film.
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Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is a delirious, wildly entertaining exploration of the enduring ties that bind him to the quirky city of his birth. Equal parts mystical rumination and personal history, city chronicle and deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy, Maddin blends local myth with childhood trauma to create a wholly unique – and playfully suspect – work of documentary film.

Summary

Anchored throughout his life to the snowbound, sleepy Canadian city of Winnipeg, Maddin (The Saddest Music In The World) travels headlong into his past to forge a new path to freedom. Drawn by the bittersweet pull of family, he returns to his unconventional childhood home – a split-level apartment cum beauty parlor – and moves right back in. Recruiting actors to spar with his “real” mother (played by ‘40s noir legend Ann Savage) atop the actual floorboards of his memory, he re-creates hilariously awkward moments from his adolescence. Spiraling out to the surrounding city and its peculiar locations and history, he re-imagines a notorious semi-nude civic pride event, a jazz-age séance ballet, a macabre frozen horse photo op, and “If Day,” when the whole town pretends that the Nazis have invaded. All the while Maddin travels deep into his own nostalgia, searching for an elusive way out of Winnipeg.

A self-described “docu-fantasia,” My Winnipeg is a rollicking, first-person poem of both arcane truth and boundless imagination, brazenly blurring the borders of non-fiction film with deadpan authority. Outlandish, richly layered, and disarmingly funny, MY WINNIPEG is another truly singular work of art by Guy Maddin.