TORONTO - Upon viewing Guy Maddin's brilliantly bizarre portrait of his Prairie hometown, it's tempting to embark on an extensive fact-checking mission into some of the filmmaker's more outrageous claims about Winnipeg.
Among other things, the strange yet tender tribute offers such unusual bragging rights as 10 times the global rate of sleepwalkers, mystical subterranean waterways, and animal stampedes that in one case sent homosexual bison careening through a children's playground and, in another, frantic race horses into a freezing river where they became logjammed and froze solid, their tormented heads dotting the snow-covered vista like morbid chess pieces.
Maddin said he set out to craft a fact-based film, but admitted he was largely driven by emotion and was at a loss to accurately describe what exactly he come up with in "My Winnipeg."
"I was commissioned (by the Documentary Channel) to make a documentary about Winnipeg and to make it personal ... but I'm still not sure what the hell it is I made, frankly," Maddin said last year from his cabin north of Gimli, Man., before hitting the festival circuit.
"At one point I was calling it a docu-fantasia, but then I thought that stressed the fantasia too much because I really pride myself on getting things right in it. ... It might be a docu-rant or a docu-gripe."
The film opens in Toronto on Friday, in Winnipeg on June 27 and other cities later.
Facts are a relative thing when it comes to the idiosyncratic mind of Maddin, whose love-hate relationship with Winnipeg is unfurled through a mix of archival footage and invented sequences that bestow alternating doses of heroism and shame on the city.
Shot largely in black and white, the film begins with a sleepy inhabitant on a train, desperately trying to flee the city - "again!" the narrator points out. But try as they might, Winnipeggers "are always lost, befuddled" by the strange pull of their snowy home, "the heart of the heart of the continent," and never quite leave.
Our hero drifts in and out of sleep as Maddin narrates provocative Winnipeg lore - the doomed creation of the Happyland amusement park in the early years of the 20th century, the notorious city seances of 1939, the simulated Nazi invasion of 1942.
Meanwhile, Maddin also revisits his own family traumas through re-enactments of childhood domestic spats featuring look-a-like actors.
Maddin, 52, insisted everything in the film is based on truth, although what constitutes truth is clearly up to interpretation.
"There are facts and then there are opinions - and to me, the originator of the opinions, that's the same thing. But I'm pretty aware of when things crossfade from fact to opinion and I always made sure the facts were carefully vetted," said Maddin, whose other outlandish experiments include "Brand Upon the Brain," "The Saddest Music in the World" and "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs."
"(Initially) I refused to do research on the movie, but once some people found out I was working on the film they would offer up stories and myths, factoids and honest-to-God rock solid history . . . whether I wanted them or not. So I'd have to corroborate them and I ended up doing research. It was really irritating and I got drawn into the thing, but everything seemed to rotate around these kind of mystical coincidences and First Nations traditions and the fact that the city is at the geographical centre of North America. And all these sort of secret Masonic and para-psychological and aboriginal things."
Two of Maddin's biggest gripes revolve around the well-documented destruction of two cherished landmarks - the city's flagship Eaton's building and the Winnipeg Arena, a facility replaced by the slick new MTS Centre on Portage Avenue that Maddin derides as the "MT" (as in "empty") centre.
"Demolition is one of our few growth industries," he intones during the film.
Still, Maddin said he loves his hometown, noting that Winnipeg has its moments of greatness and beauty, albeit ones that tend to appear on the frostiest days.
And as fantastical as "My Winnipeg" may seem, Maddin said it comprises some of Canadas greatest and truest myths that should be remembered, celebrated and passed on.
"In the shadow of America, perhaps the greatest self-mythologizers of all time, we're just too shy to even attempt a little mythology. So we've gone the other way and we make our histories and our historical figures smaller than life. But I'm just presenting them life-sized here," he said.
"What's beautiful about the myths in Winnipeg is that the best ones, anyway, actually happened."
News from �The Canadian Press, 2008
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