My Winnipeg - by Guy Maddin (Paperback)

About the Book

The Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world's foremost cinéaste planant, is far from the Winnipeg you'll find in tourist brochures.

Book Synopsis

A herd of horses frozen in a river. A bargain bridge. Séances. Golden Boy pageants. A demolished hockey arena. St. Mary's Academy for Girls. Spanky the Guide Dog through Time. An epidemic of sleepwalking.

This is the Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, the world's foremost cinéaste planant, and it's not the Winnipeg you'll find in tourist brochures. When the iconoclastic auteur of The Saddest Music in the World decided to tackle the subject of his hometown, it could only have become a 'docu-fantasia, ' a melange of personal history, civic tragedy and mystical hypothesizing. The result is wildly delirious, deeply personal and deliciously entertaining.

Herewith, venture deeper into the mind of Maddin with the text of his narration, wantonly annotated with an avalanche of marginal digressions, stills, outtakes, family photos, emails, essays, deoculations, animations, notebook pages and collages. There's even an X-ray of Spanky the pug and an in-depth interview with Michael Ondaatje.

Review Quotes

'If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin ... he rewrites history; when that fails, he creates it.' - Roger Ebert

'[Maddin is] the most reluctantly radical and humorously tortured maverick working in the movies today.' - John Waters, director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray.

'For followers of the director's work, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg [the book] is a great find, showcasing perhaps that part of the man's authorial voice that comes from his writing as opposed to his direction.' - Broken Pencil

About the Author

Guy Maddin is a Winnipeg-based filmmaker and writer. His feature films include Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in the World. His films have won numerous prizes, and he is the youngest recipient of the Telluride Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.