Tales from the Gimli Hospital

Tales from the Gimli Hospital 1988 was the feature film debut of director Guy Maddin, his second film after the short The Dead Father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in black and white on 16mm film and stars Kyle McCulloch as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar played by Michael Gottli for the attention of the young nurses.

The film opens on two young children whose mother is dying in the presentday Gimli, Manitoba hospital. During a visit to see her, the childrens Icelandic grandmother launches into the grim and convoluted tale of Einar the Lonely, a patient in a fardistantpast version of the same hospitalin a Gimli we no longer know, as the grandmother puts it. The rest of the film consists of Einars story.Einar Kyle McCulloch succumbs to a smallpox epidemic and is admitted to the Gimli hospital for treatment, where he meets his neighbor Gunnar Michael Gottli. While both are at first pleased to have a friend nearby in their time of illness, the two men soon begin competing for the attentions and affections of the hospitals beautiful young nurses. Gunnar outperforms Einar in this regard, given his storytelling abilities and his skill at carving birch bark into the shape of fish. The hospital is built above a stable for heat from the animals and director Maddin appears in a cameo as a surgeon who operates while patients are told to observe a badlyacted puppet show as a sort of anesthesia. ........

Source: Wikipedia