BERLIN—It’s one thing to be a filmmaker passionate about creating art. It’s another to move back into your childhood home, bring your 89-year-old mother with you to reenact scenes from 1963 and then meld that personal drama with “pithy gripes about how (your) city hasn’t taken care of its past, and has given little regard to its future.”
But that’s what Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has done to produce his genre-defying work, My Winnipeg.
Quirky premise? Maybe. But Maddin’s film – a reflection on the history and heritage of his hometown, which he calls “the most isolated city in North America” – is catching on fast.
It won the City Award for Best Canadian Feature at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. And next week, along with Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini’s series of shorts about the sex lives of insects, My Winnipeg will open the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival – one of a handful of Canadian films to gain a spot in this year’s lineup.
Granted, there’s a lot of star power showing up Feb. 7-17 to compete with, starting with Martin Scorsese whose descent on the German capital will be flanked by Mick Jagger and company presenting the competition opener, Shine a Light, a musical film featuring two concerts the Rolling Stones gave at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2006.
Madonna is causing a media frenzy with her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, about three young people in search of elusive dreams. And Hollywood bombshells stealing the spotlight at Marlene Dietrich Platz will include Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman (The Other Boleyn Girl) and Penélope Cruz (Elegy).
Not to mention on the male side, the star of stars in Bollywood, Shahrukh Khan (Om Shanti Om).
But for Maddin, none of the glamour at the Berlin fest bothers him. On the contrary, he likes “that there are high-profile glitzy stars there, because it’s a thrill for us independent filmmakers to be considered part of the same world.”
And who’s to say a different Canadian star won’t shoot from this year’s crop – the way Sarah Polley did last year with her widely praised Away From Her?
Two films by Quebec directors are expected to make a mark, both dealing with problems of youth. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s La Ring, (The Fight) tells of a hard-knock Montreal childhood while Yves-Christian Fournier’s world premiere of Tout est parfait (Everything is Fine) features a teen struggling to cope after his friends commit suicide.
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Also appearing in the Panorama section is Otto; or, up with Dead People, a zombie flick directed by Bruce LaBruce, a global star in the gay film scene who is returning to the Berlinale where his films screened in 2004 and ’06.
Perhaps the venue where Canadians stand out most visibly this year is in the short film genre. Claudia Morgado Escanilla’s No Bikini; Maxime Desmons’s Bonne Mère; Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon’s Miss Chief Eagle Testickle Trilogy; Jeremy Shaw’s Best Minds, Part One; Scott Miller Barry’s Taking Pictures; and Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob’s Wildflowers of Manitoba all feature as short works.
Feature-length co-productions with Canada, such as Be Like Others, by Tanaz Eshaghian, and Flipping Out, by Yoav Shamir, are also screening.
Some 15 films directed by Canadians, or produced with Canadian help, are appearing in the festival overall.
For Maddin, who has been invited three years in a row to Berlin (Brand Upon the Brain! showed here last year and My Dad is 100 Years Old in 2006, both featuring Rossellini), it is the rapid evolution – and popularization – of documentaries in recent years that’s been the biggest boon for filmmakers like himself who work in unconventional narratives.
“Documentaries play in multiplexes now in North America,” he says about the trend, “and I’m happy to be part of that.”
In the case of My Winnipeg – which charts the city’s course from the time of native Americans through to modern sports history – Maddin didn’t intend such a personal exploration.
But “as I started making this documentary, I was having trouble separating hometown from home, then home from family, so I ended up mingling the history of my childhood home with the history of the city.”
In his portrayal of that city, Maddin, like every artist, hopes he has hit on some element of the universal. And starting next week, foreign audiences will be the judges of whether what they see of Canada as it’s projected onto the big screen hits home or not.