My Winnipeg
| My Winnipeg | |
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| Directed by | Guy Maddin |
| Produced by | Michael Burns Phyllis Laing Guy Maddin Jody Shapiro |
| Written by | Guy Maddin George Toles (dialogue) |
| Starring |
Darcy Fehr Ann Savage Louis Negin Amy Stewart Brendan Cade Wesley Cade |
| Narrated by | Guy Maddin |
| Music by | Jason Staczek |
| Cinematography | Jody Shapiro |
| Edited by | John Gurdebeke |
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Production
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Running time
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80 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $500,000 |
My Winnipeg is a 2007 film directed and written by Guy Maddin with dialogue by George Toles. Described by Maddin as a "docu-fantasia," that melds "personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing," the film is a surrealist mockumentary about Winnipeg, Maddin's home town. A New York Times article described the film's unconventional take on the documentary style by noting that it "skates along an icy edge between dreams and lucidity, fact and fiction, cinema and psychotherapy."
My Winnipeg began when Maddin was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, and originally titled Love Me, Love My Winnipeg. Maddin's producer directed "Don't give me the frozen hellhole everyone knows that Winnipeg is," so Maddin cast Darcy Fehr in the role of "Guy Maddin" and structured the documentary around a metafictional plot that mythologizes the city and Maddin's autobiography.
Although ostensibly a documentary, My Winnipeg contains a series of fictional episodes and an overall story trajectory concerning the author-narrator-character "Guy Maddin" and his desire to produce the film as a way to finally leave/escape the city of Winnipeg. "Guy Maddin" is played by Darcy Fehr but voiced by Maddin himself (in narration): Fehr appears groggily trying to rouse himself from sleep aboard a jostling train as Maddin wonders aloud "What if?" What if he were able to actually rouse from the sleepy life he lives in Winnipeg and escape? Maddin decides that the only possible escape would be to "film my way out," thus motivating the creation of the "docu-fantasia" already underway.
Maddin then describes Winnipeg in general terms, introducing it to the viewer, noting primarily its location at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, a place known as "the Forks". Maddin equates this Y-like junction to a woman's groin and associates it with his mother. Maddin also notes the apocryphal aboriginal myth of a secret "Forks beneath the Forks," an underground river system below the aboveground river system—the superimposition of these two sets of rivers has imbued the site and Winnipeg itself with magical/magnetic/sexual energy. Maddin also notes that Winnipeg is the geographical centre of North America, and thus these secret rivers are "the Heart of the Heart" of the continent and of Canada. Maddin regales the viewer with one of the film's many suspect historical "facts" about Winnipeg: "the Canadian Pacific Railway used to sponsor an annual treasure hunt [that] required our citizens to wander our city in a day-long combing of the streets and neighbourhoods. First prize was a one-way ticket on the next train out of town." No winners in a hundred years could bring themselves to leave the city after coming to know the city so closely over the course of the treasure hunt. Maddin then posits an alternative explanation for Winnipeggers never leaving Winnipeg: sleepiness. He notes that Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world, with ten times the normal rate of sleepwalking, and that everyone in Winnipeg carries around the keys to their former homes in case they return while asleep. Winnipeg by-laws require that sleepwalkers be allowed to sleep in their old homes by the new tenants.
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Wikipedia