Movie Review: My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin describes his filmMy Winnipeg as a documentary fantasia, which works because it needs a new name for this form. Maddin narrates a stream of consciousness memory of city facts and family history over a set of mostly black and white images. Some are recreations others are archival footage. It reminded me a lot of Very Nice, Very Nice which I discovered a few days ago.

Some of the stories are merely odd twists of recent events like personal connections to a classic hockey arena that was recently torn down. Others are bizzare John Hodgeman-like folktales like a pack of horses freezing in a river one winter with their heads sticking up from the ice and the people visiting them all winter long and a baby boom that occurs 9 months later. While this seems fabricated, at the Q&A after the film he said it really happened.

Another tale involves the only TV series made in Winnipeg, called Ledgeman. It was a weekly show about someone threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a ledge and being talked down each week. It seemed like a bit of Hodgemanesque brilliance but again he mentioned it in the Q&A as if it were real, though it has to be a joke; right?

The film is only 80 minutes long but it only kept my interest for about 30. After a while I tired of the over-the-top reminiscences of stories mixing fact and fiction and exaggeration. If it sustains you'll like the film very much. For me, not so much.