April Film Club

Good April to you all!  Thank you to everyone who was able to make it out for our viewing of The Wind that Shakes the Barley, it was a good turn out and we had some new faces (huzzah!)  and we had a real good discussion following the film.  Also, isn't this spring weather great?  Except for that recent bout of snow, the horrid winter seems to have finally passed and we can enjoy life again, (another huzzah!).  For the great month of April I have decided to show one of my favorite films.  It is admittedly strange, but it is such a lovely film, I think you'll all enjoy it.  This month we are watching Guy Maddin's excellent My Winnipeg.

My Winnipeg is a 2007 film directed and written by Guy Maddin with dialogue by George Toles.  Described by Maddin as a "docu-fantasia" that melds personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing," the film is a surrealist mockumentary about Winnipeg, Maddin's home town.  A New York Times article described the film's 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 author-narrator-character "Guy Maddin" and his desire to produce a film as a way to finally leave/escape the city of Winnipeg.

The film currently holds a certified fresh rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes out of 82 critical reviews.  Roger Ebert awarded the film 4/4 stars saying this of Maddin's work, "If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin.  If you have never heard of him, I am not surprised.  Now you have.  A new Maddin movie doesn't play in every multiplex, city or state.  If you hear of one opening, seize the day.  Or search where obscure films can be found.  You will be plunged into the mind of a man who thinks in the images of old silent films, disreputable documentaries, movies that never were, from eras beyond comprehension.  His imagination frees the lurid possibilities of the banal.  He rewrites history; when that fails, he creates it."

This is one of my all time favorite films.  Watching it is such a joy and reminds me, every second of its duration, just why I love film so much.  Few films achieve this, and fewer directors are able to produce something that elicits that feeling in me, but Maddin is one of them, and My Winnipeg is among the very best.

I hope that you can come out and join us for this wonderful film!  We will be meeting Thursday, April 16th at 6:15pm

Here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56t5N_XFcxQ