My Winnipeg

A herd of horses frozen in a river. A bargain bridge. Seances. Golden Boy pageants. A demolished hockey arena. St. Mary’s Academy for Girls. Spanky the Guide Dog through Time. An epidemic of sleepwalking.

This is the Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world’s foremost cineaste planant, and it’s not the Winnipeg you’ll find in tourist brochures. When the iconoclastic auteur of The Saddest Music in the World decided to tackle the subject of his hometown, it could only have become a ‘docu-fantasia,’ a melange of personal history, civic tragedy and mystical hypothesizing. The result is wildly delirious, deeply personal and deliciously entertaining.

Herewith, venture deeper into the mind of Maddin with the text of his narration, wantonly annotated with an avalanche of marginal digressions, stills, outtakes, family photos, emails, essays, deoculations, animations, notebook pages and collages. There’s even an X-ray of Spanky the pug and an in-depth interview with Michael Ondaatje.