Glorious (2009, Canada, 12 min.)
Glorious tells the story of an aging crime family patriarch, holed up in a derelict apartment block. Maddin pulls out all the stops as the film unfolds into an orgy of paranoia, bursting ammo shells, rackety disarmaments and oral gratification from beyond the grave. Featuring the music of British/Dutch composer Richard Ayres.Read More »
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.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 »
Kosmos is a thief who works miracles. He arrives in this timeless border town from the wilds weeping, as though a fugitive. No sooner is he there than he rescues a small boy from drowning in the river, and is recognized as a man who works miracles.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 »