The inner child
Ruth Hessey chats to Guy Maddin, director of one of the Festival's most enchanting and weird films
Director Maddin exhumes his childhood
Most of us embalm our childhoods in nostalgia, but how many exhume the family history, and re-enact it using real actors?
In his new, very peculiar and entrancing film My Winnipeg, Canadian documentary filmmaker Guy Maddin went so far as to rent part of the house he grew up in, and dress it like a proper film set, with the icons of the dearly departed family living room.
"My childhood was very melodramatic," he explains spookily. "One grandfather was suspected of domestic atrocities, and a grandmother poked her son's eye out."
The film is mostly a poetic black and white exploration of what Winnipeg means to Maddin - "I did most of the research while out walking the dog" - and includes seriously loopy Winnipeg myths and legends, heroes, favourite locations past and present, and the winter weather. "In summer Winnipeg is just ordinary; in winter it's magical".
To put it all together he says: "I riffed and free-associated a radio voiceover and edited the images together like a big set of Tupperware."
"Don't even ask me why I decided to re-enact my childhood," he continues. "It was completely surreal and I'm glad I did it. It was a strange and moving experience." It helped that Maddin's mother had kept all the clothes he and his siblings wore. "Mum was keen to help," he says, "even though there was a degree of privacy I sacrificed to make the film." Sparing his mother the ordeal, Maddin coaxed a wonderful Hollywood actress, Anne Savage, out of 51 years of retirement, to play his mother. "Mom cast the longest shadow in our family," he says.
When My Winnipeg screened in Berlin "there was a lot of Teutonic, post-structural eyebrow knitting," but the film was a hit.
A key guest of SFF, Maddin says he loves the atmosphere. "It puts people into a trance for the duration of the festival, hypnotising them to open their minds to films they'd never pay to see."
My Winnipeg Screening Tue June 10, 7.30pm & Wed June 11, 10am at State Theatre