2000s

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 »

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 »

Introduced separately, the protagonists are clustered into three groups. In the first, college-aged, cheerful Merdad and more serious-minded friend Ali are sneaking two pint-size cousins out of Iran to reunite them with refugee parents already in Austria.
In the second group, Lale and Hussan travel over the mountains by foot with their own young son, hoping to find European asylum from political persecution. After some tense moments, these first two groups find themselves safely –for the moment — across the border, in the same car driven by a kindly coyote.
In Ankara, they soon discover such friends are hard to find. Turkish cops and Iranian secret police are on the prowl for illegals; even the manager at the hotel where the protags are housed turns out to be an informant.Read More »

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A high school graduate, Yusuf could not pass the university entrance exam. Writing poetry is his greatest passion and some of his poems are being printed in various obscure literary journals. But neither these poems, nor the rapidly falling price of the milk they sell, are being of any benefit to Yusuf and Zehra’s lives. When Yusuf finds out about Zehra’s secret affair with the town’s stationmaster he gets disconcerted. Will he find the way to cope with his anxiety for the unknown future, the rapid change that he is going through and the pain of taking a step into adulthood and leaving his youth behind?Read More »

The Image Makers (Swedish original title: Bildmakarna) is a 2000 Swedish TV drama directed by Ingmar Bergman and written by Per Olov Enquist.The play was originally written for and staged by the Royal Dramatic Theatre (featuring the same cast), where it premiered on Feb 13, 1998 (directed by Bergman). Following the success of the stage production, it was adapted for Swedish television (SVT) in 2000 with Bergman as a director.The Image Makers portrays an odd meeting of four great Swedish artists: author Selma Lagerlöf, actress Tora Teje, film director Victor Sjöström and film photographer Julius Jaenzon. The drama is set in the year 1920 at Swedish Filmstudios where the great silent film director Victor Sjöström is shooting the silent film The Phantom Carriage, an adaptation of Lagerlöf’s popular novel Körkarlen. He has now invited the book’s grand authoress to take a first look at some early scenes…Read More »