2001-2010

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 »

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Belle Epoque, or the Last Waltz in Sarajevo (Belle epoque, ili poslednji valcer u Sarajevu, 2007) by Nikola Stojanovic is a historical film, which means it is film as history. But it is also film history (as in the study of film)—the work of a film historian. The historical context of the film is made explicit immediately, through the use of pre-credit intertitles questioning what happened in the turn-of-the-(20th )-century Balkans. A subsequent title of dedication “to the pioneers of film” marks the work as a love letter to cinema. In this case, the “belle époque” mentioned in the title refers most closely to the formative years of cinema. It is the subtitle “the last waltz in Sarajevo” that is aligned with the political history of the film. This extended opening intertitle sequence continues, posing the possibility that to understand the wars of secession in Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth century, we can study the beginning of that same century, where its historical roots lie. So begins a unique film that is an attempt to resurrect history at the same time that, reflexively, the film’s very existence as a finished product is one of resurrected film history itself.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 »

Hal Ashby set the standard for subsequent independent filmmakers by crafting unique, thoughtful, and challenging films that continue to influence new generations of directors. Initially finding success as an editor, Ashby won an Academy Award for editing In the Heat of the Night (1967), and he translated his skills as an editor into a career as one of the quintessential directors of 1970s.

Perhaps best remembered for the enduring cult classic Harold and Maude (1971), Ashby quickly became known for melding quirky comedy and intense drama with performances from A-list actors such as Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail (1973), Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn in Shampoo (1975), Jon Voight and Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978), and Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine in Being There (1979). Ashby’s personal life was difficult. He endured his parents’ divorce, his father’s suicide, and his own failed marriage all before the age of nineteen, and his notorious drug abuse contributed to the decline of his career near the end of his life.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 »

It’s the winter of 1933 in Winnipeg. In honor of Winnipeg being named the sorrow capital of the world for the Depression era for the fourth year running by the London Times, Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the legless owner of Winnipeg’s Port-Huntley Beer, is hosting and judging a contest to see which nation has the saddest music in the world, the winner to take home a $25,000 prize. Seeing as to the current Prohibition in the United States, Lady Port-Huntley has ulterior motives for the contest. Father and son, streetcar conductor Fyodor Kent and New York based musical producer Chester Kent, who both have a past connection to Lady Port-Huntley (Fyodor, a WWI veteran and former doctor, has fashioned for her an unusual pair of artificial legs apropos to her business), want to represent Canada and the United States respectively in the contest.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 »