My Winnipeg

Quite unlike anything else, Guy Maddin’s finest film to date is an extraordinary blend of autobiographical reminiscence, travelogue documentary, polemical essay, surreal satire and pure cinematic poetry.

Inspired by the release of My Winnipeg, Soda Pictures in conjunction with Four Docs, 3 Minute Wonder, The Branchage Film Festival & Destination Winnipeg have launched the filmmaking competition 'Your Winnipeg'. Entrants are invited to submit a 3-minute documentary about their hometown being as experimental and creatively adventurous as they dare!

Guy Maddin will join a jury of industry professionals to select the winning entry, which will be screened on Channel 4 and included on the DVD release of My Winnipeg. The winner will also be rewarded with £1500 and a holiday to Winnipeg, Canada. 3 runner up films will also be screened on Channel 4 and the winners will each receive £1500. A selection of further films will also join the prize-winning entries and be shown at Branchage: Jersey Film Festival in September. Full details are available at http://www.yourwinnipeg.co.uk.

Quite unlike anything else, Guy Maddin's finest film to date is an extraordinary blend of autobiographical reminiscence, travelogue documentary, polemical essay, surreal satire and pure cinematic poetry.

Taken at face value, the movie is an engagingly eccentric, absurdist account both of the writer-director's own life and of his snowbound Manitoba hometown's likewise oddball history. But amid the expert and often hilarious parodies of silent-era stylistics, lurid Hollywood B-movies and madly repetitive TV soaps - not to mention deliciously wicked Freudian and philosophical innuendo and much musing on Winnipeg's sleep-inducing qualities - there is real purpose: Maddin bemoans the erosion of social, cultural, architectural and other traditions in an increasingly homogenised corporate world. Dazzlingly imaginative, flagrantly fantastic, yet clearly very heartfelt, this spell-binding film speaks its own very special truth.

Directed by:

Guy Maddin

Cast:

Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Country:

Canada

Year:

2007

Running time:

80min