Canadian director Guy Maddin takes on his hometown in My Winnipeg
 That kooky Canadian, Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World), is back with another moc-doc-fantasy-surreal thing, this time supposedly about his boyhood home and current residence, Winnipeg.
Unless you are a fan of avant-garde films, you may never have heard of Maddin, but he’s been making movies since the ’80s, and has a large following among independent film folks.
He’s often called “the Canadian David Lynch,” and many bios of him cite as a seminal childhood moment “a piggy-back ride from Bing Crosby,” but, as with the scenarios of his films, distinguishing fact from fiction is part of the journey.
Opening this Friday at the Bijou as part of the Arts & Education Council’s Independent Film Series, My Winnipeg is in Maddin’s signature black-and-white, with the silent-filmesque inter-titles and “We were big!” style of acting.
Supposedly drawn from episodes in his boyhood, the film’s mood is set by Maddin’s voiceover at the beginning, as he dramatically insists, “I must leave,” but of course, never does. The “Maddin” character is played by an actor, and though we are told the character of his mother is actually played by his mother, that’s also untrue.
Maddin intersperses actual facts and history about Winnipeg with information that he simply makes up—for example, Winnipeg does not have ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world.
The director also invents a ’60s TV show called Ledge Man, in which the title character threatens to hurl himself from a different high-rise each week.
In other words, if you like immersing yourself in someone’s off-kilter, ironic and frequently hilarious imagination, your destination this weekend should be My Winnipeg.
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