My Winnipeg is Better Then Yours

by Rob on June 27th, 2008

To those who’ve never been there, Winnipeg can seem like a forbidding place of freezing winters and mosquito infested summers. Not for me, thanks. It’s fair to say, though, that Guy Maddin thinks differently.

The famous Canadian director loves his hometown so much that he’s never lived anywhere else. Nor can he escape it in any conventional sense. He can only attempt to leave through cinema, and so his latest film, My Winnipeg, tries to reconcile his past in the hopes his future can move on.

So for the movie he rented the apartment he grew up in and hired actors to play his family. What transpires over the next 80 minutes of film is a surrealist documentary; fact and fiction blend together to tell a fantastic black-and-white history of Winnipeg. It’s a masterful, uproarious movie that’s fast changing the Winnipeg stereotype: it won an official selection at the Berlin International Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival, and at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival it was selected as the Best Canadian Feature.

My Winnipeg is now screening at Toronto’s Varsity Cinemas, 55 Bloor Street West, Manulife Centre.

For more about the film, visit:

http://www.ifcfilms.com

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