My Winnipeg

My Winnipeg is a 2007 film directed and written by Guy Maddin with dialogue by George Toles. Described by Maddin as a docufantasia, that melds personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing, the film is a surrealist mockumentary about Winnipeg, Maddins home town. A New York Times article described the films 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.

Although ostensibly a documentary, My Winnipeg contains a series of fictional episodes and an overall story trajectory concerning the authornarratorcharacter Guy Maddin and his desire to produce the film as a way to finally leaveescape 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 docufantasia 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 Ylike junction to a womans 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 systemthe superimposition of these two sets of rivers has imbued the site and Winnipeg itself with magicalmagneticsexual 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 films 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 daylong combing of the streets and neighbourhoods. First prize was a oneway 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

Source: Wikipedia