My Winnipeg

My Word! My Winnipeg

Surely one of the weirdest 'documentaries' around, Guy Maddin's 'My Winnipeg' is off the wall enough to have something for everyone, but perhaps not enough to hold everyone long enough to find whatever it is that's for them. Apparently a personal history of Maddin's home town, it's littered with throwaway curiosities like seances conducted through ballet, octogenarian hockey protests, gay buffalo stampedes, frozen horses for lovers, cemeteries for old signage, Citizen Girl (righter of working class wrongs), a longrunning TV show called 'Ledgeman', and well, so much craziness that you'll just have to watch it yourself. Unfortunately it is all told in a low-key, sleepwalking style that, though quite beautiful visually and aurally, made it difficult for me to watch through in one sitting, despite being only 80 minutes long. Not quite the masterpiece it's been made out to be in some quarters, it's still well worth a look. Bizarre.