Director Guy Maddin Contemplates His Canadian Hometown in Dreamlike ‘My Winnipeg’

CHICAGO – The distinct, gauzy style of director Guy Maddin has created unique cinematic prisms to look through including his depression-era meditation in “The Saddest Music in the World”. In his latest film, which is a documentary of sorts, Maddin explores his own life through his hometown of Winnipeg.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

He contemplates the far-off sense of leaving the city and seeks a kind of renewal through an anti-nostalgic look back at it. Guy Maddin was born in Winnipeg in 1956. He speaks of his early life there while living in a ramshackle home that contained his mother and aunt’s beauty parlor.

Read Patrick McDonald’s full review of “My Winnipeg” in our reviews section. View our full, high-resolution “My Winnipeg” image gallery.

His development is distilled through the sights, sounds and smells of the salon along with the memories of the icons serving Winnipeg.

The giant downtown department store, the hockey arena where his father worked and a strange amusement park called Happyland all figure into his conscious reminiscence. The loss of this signals both the end of the era and his youth.

To take the “My Winnipeg” film experiment in looking back to another level, Maddin rents the beauty parlor house where he once lived and hires actors to play his brothers, sister and mother from 1963.

He then recreates specific and sometimes uncomfortable moments from his family history and watches them again in the sense of a voyeur traveling through time. His Winnipeg always remains in the center of it all.

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full “My Winnipeg” review.

Kate Yacula as Citizen Girl in “My Winnipeg,” which is directed by Guy Maddin.
Photo credit: Jody Shapiro, copyright Everyday Pictures

Ann Savage as Mother and Darcy Fehr as Ledge Man in “My Winnipeg,” which is directed by Guy Maddin.
Photo credit: Jody Shapiro, copyright Everyday Pictures

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full “My Winnipeg” review.

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