My Winnipeg

I must admit to having become a bit cynical over the course of MIFF. Many of the docos I've seen at MIFF have employed some stylised or experimental elements, the kind of thing I get excited about, but when I actually see them they never seem to work as well as I want them to. The most effective films have seemed to be the ones that didn't bother and just used classic interview and observation. It's been a paradox.

Just when I was losing faith, along comes My Winnipeg. Wow. Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin throws all convention to the wind in this dream-like journey through his home town, its history, its myths and his own memories. It is like a beat poem on film, except instead of Kerouac's highways or Ginsberg's California, it unfolds in a snow smothered landscape of leafless trees and urban decay - Manitoba, the frigid heart of the North American continent and dead middle of nowhere. The film is shot almost entirely in black and white, giving it alternately a bleak, horror-movie feel or the tones of cheesy melodrama. He does everything from represent historical events with shadow puppets to recreate his own childhood with child actors playing opposite his actual mother. He appears in it himself, but always asleep on a train, while scenes from his city and his life roll past the window. It's completely undefinable and absolutely glorious.

So what is it that makes a convention-buster like this work, when other experiments have been leaving me a bit non-plussed? If I had to put a name on it, I'd say necessity. I get the feeling with some films that stylistic devices are added just because the film-maker thinks they'd be cool, whereas in fact you could tell the story just as easily without them. My Winnipeg couldn't be told any other way. How can you convey on camera all the accretions of emotion, memory and imagination attached to your hometown? Maddin employs whatever devices he can to portray his relationship to his town, the combined sense of comfort and oppression, love and hate, familiarity and bewilderment, recognisable to anyone who has lived in a place a long time. Every device he uses is serving that aesthetic. Without them it might have been a film about Winnipeg, but it wouldn't have been a film about Home.