Product Description

My Winnipeg winds its way through the birthplace of personal mythologies, attempting to understand the nature of memory. Equal parts mystical rumination and personal history, city chronicle and deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy, My Winnipeg blends local myth with childhood trauma, all narrated with director Maddin's usual entertaining and inspired energy. Commissioned by Michael Burns whose command was 'enchant me with your treatment' this was Maddin's cue to set about exploring the spell of his home town. By mixing animation, archive and re-enactments he has created an extraordinary visual homage in true indivivdual Guy Maddin style. The film won the Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto Film Festival. Special features include an interview with the director, Guy Maddin, at the BFI Southbank.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17412 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-10-27
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Colour, Dolby, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 80 minutes

Synopsis
Canadian director Guy Maddin (THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD) takes his quasi-documentary strain of filmmaking to a satisfying, and deliriously inventive, extreme with MY WINNIPEG. The film follows Maddin, who narrates and plays the character of Darcy Fehr, as he tries to escape the Canadian city of Winnipeg. Maddin grew up in Winnipeg and spent his entire life there. The city seems to be casting a magnetic hold over him, so he decides to film his way out. He moves a cast of actors into his childhood home, asking them to recreate pivotal moments from his upbringing. Here the family gathers to undertake mundane chores and to watch a TV show named 'Ledge Guy'. The show stars Maddin's mother as a woman who tries to stop her son from committing suicide in each episode. Maddin couples these scenes with a warped history of Winnipeg, which include stories of a legendary racetrack fire and the sad tale of the city's ailing ice hockey team.


MY WINNIPEG finds Maddin sticking closely to the filmmaking style that he developed in features such as COWARDS BEND THE KNEE and BRAND UPON THE BRAIN. The film apes silent-era techniques; shots fall in and out of focus; and Maddin uses Super-8, 16mm, and even a cell phone camera to help drive his vision. The B-movie star Ann Savage gives a wonderfully hammy performance as Maddin's mother, and the director's voiceover commentary demonstrates both his fondness for and his frustration with Winnipeg. It's difficult to ascertain how much truth there is in Maddin's recollections of the city's chequered history, but this only adds to the heightened sense of absurdity. MY WINNIPEG is a fine example of Maddin's extraordinary talents, and provides ample proof that he is one of the most resourceful and innovative filmmakers in the independent film scene.

Customer Reviews

Engaging, eccentric tribute to hometown
This engaging, very personal tribute from weird Canadian director Guy Maddin to his hometown of Winnipeg is very well done. Shot in black and white with his familiar style that reminds one of both silent cinema and the films of David Lynch, the plot has an alter ego of the director hire his elderly, domineering mother (actually b-movie starlet from the 1940s Ann Savage) and actors playing his siblings in order to relive his teenage years in the sixties, and sort of understand what makes him tick. The movie includes a lot of lore about Winnipeg that may be true in some cases and is almost certainly not true in other cases (the story about the frozen horses' heads in the river, for example, is hard for me to believe). This deadpan, funny tribute is most of all a nostalgic paean to his childhood, and a denunciation of modern capitalism mindless drive to change all things (Maddin recounts in a heartfelt way how they demolished a popular department store as well as his beloved ice hockey arena, for example). And because nostalgia of our childhood is something that most people can relate to, this makes this movie more accessible than other films of him. The film explains also the reason he never leave Winnipeg (in order to defend it, and not let others completely ruin it) as well as a lot of the obsessions in his other movies (for instance, his fascination with communist aesthetics seems rooted in the strong labor movement in his hometown).