Guy Maddin

Fancy, Fancy Being Rich combines Guy Maddin’s favorite film fetishes and is thus instantly recognizable as one of his flamboyant creatures. His visual technique replicates the scratched and scarred silver nitrate skin of the silent films he idolizes. His works have an operatic flavor, as if perfectly located on a melodramatic borderline between repression and release. Perhaps this also explains the hilarious sexual symbolism that runs rampant through his intricately imagined and riotously perverse mise en scene.Read More »

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Ainar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.Read More »

Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown) reluctantly returns to his childhood home, an abandoned Canadian island, where his parents ran an orphanage. As Guy fulfills his dying mother’s request to paint the lighthouse which served as the orphanage, memories of strange events there overpower him. An undercover investigation by child author/detective Wendy (Katherine Scharhon) and a revolt by the repressed children, blew open a cover-up by Guy’s parents. Wendy disguised herself as her brother Chance and discovered that Maddin’s inventor father performed outro scientific experiments on the orphans. In black and white, with title cards, plus narration by Isabella Rossellini. In the film’s opening weeks, some showings included live narrators (such as Crispin Glover, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele), an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound effects techs.Read More »

The Little White Cloud that Cried is an explicit tribute to legendary underground queer filmmaker Jack Smith (link). The film centers around an epic transsexual orgy, and it is very graphic.

It was commissioned for the Jack Smith festival “Five Flaming Days in a Rented World ” in Berlin.Read More »

In a surreal docu-fantasia of her father’s life, Isabella Rosellini conjures back to life some of the greatest movie makers of the 20th century to help her make sense of Roberto Rossellini’s celluloid legacy, 100 years after his birth.

Isabella Rossellini asked Guy Maddin to direct My Father is 100 Years Old after they worked together on Maddin’s feature The Saddest Music in the World in 2003.

‘I was really shocked when she asked me to do it because I’d be cobbling together really low budget, artsy-fartsy, solipsistic things and I even pegged myself about as far away from Roberto Rossellini than anybody could get.’Read More »

Plot Outline :
A sort-of musical set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, where a beer baroness organizes a contest to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians from around the world descend on the city to try and win first place – a $25,000 prize.Read More »

Guy Maddin directed this short biopic on the castrato known as the Manitoba Meadowlark, Dov Houle, who performed on tour with the film (Brand Upon the Brain!)

Music: It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today (Lisbonna, Conner) sung by Arthur Tracy, additional vocals by Stacey NattrassRead More »

In a crowded auditorium, a hilarious and mildly erotic party train is formed. Guy Maddin imprints his unique filmmaking stamp on the emerging cell phone medium in this irreverent romp.

This version is with the music Guy intended but couldn’t use due to copyright issues.Read More »

Quote:
Idiosyncratic, cheeky and uncategorizable, the films of Guy Maddin are testaments to the singular vision of a great contemporary cinema artist, and Keyhole may be his boldest film yet. A surreal indoor odyssey of one man, Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) struggling to reach his wife (Isabella Rosellini) in her bedroom upstairs, this hypnotic dreamlike journey bewilders and captivates. –TIFFRead More »