Saturday, November 7, 2009 East Central Illinois

11th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival 2009

'My Winnipeg' a portrait of both city, filmmaker

By: Melissa Merli
Friday, April 24, 2009

CHAMPAIGN – Anyone wanting to get in touch with childhood memories might want to get in touch with Canadian director Guy Maddin.

His "My Winnipeg," shown Thursday afternoon at the 11th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival at the Virginia Theatre, deeply accesses the creative energies and sensory experiences of childhood, said Time Out Chicago magazine editor/film critic Hank Sartin. He appeared onstage after the screening with Maddin and "Chop Shop" director Ramin Bahrani.

Maddin, who teaches a university course on the cinema of childhood, said the first assignment he gives his students is to write of their earliest memories.

One of his earliest is of being dragged to a travelogue movie once every two weeks by an elderly aunt. He remembered those as being dreamlike, as is "My Winnipeg," even though the "docu-fantasia" goes far beyond most travelogues in its images and the emotions expressed, which run the gamut of desires, laments, weepings and cursings, Maddin said.

Once tagged by a Canadian magazine as the "mad poet of Manitoba," Maddin was commissioned to make the civic portrait of his hometown, where he still lives, in addition to having an apartment in Toronto, where his daughter and grandchild live.

The 53-year-old Maddin notes that the black-and-white "My Winnipeg" is less a portrait of the city than one of himself, even though in it he re-enacted events that actually did take place in Winnipeg.

Among them: horses being frozen alive as they ran across a river to escape their burning barracks. Maddin could not find any film footage of the event, which took place in 1926, but had read about the incident in newspapers.

He also re-enacted for "My Winnipeg" melodramatic scenes from his childhood, subletting his boyhood home for a month to shoot there. He coaxed American film-noir star Ann Savage, who had not acted since 1955, to portray his mother.

For "My Winnipeg," Maddin also used news footage of "If Day," a somewhat surrealistic event that really happened in 1942 in Winnipeg. On "If Day," the Canadian government staged a large Nazi invasion of Winnipeg to persuade citizens to buy war bonds.

"Imagine being a kindergartner and seeing your teacher being arrested by Nazis," Maddin said.

"My Winnipeg," released to theaters in 2007, was recently released on DVD. Maddin brought with him to Ebertfest the companion book, "My Winnipeg."

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