My Winnipeg

fran hoepfner4.0

I wish canada was real

Will Sloan5.0

I've had a lot of cause to think about memory lately. When people leave us, memories are all we have of them, and these memories aren't neatly filed away and preserved in one convenient box. Memories are always changing and evolving based on how we choose to mythologize our lives. They're also triggered by objects and places, and when you get rid of a place or object, you feel the weight of potentially losing whatever you have left of whoever you've lost. They're also not segregated into Good and Bad sections. When you're thinking about the goodness of what you've lost, your mind may also take you to the badness, because these things are not extricable.Guy Maddin's experimental docufantasia about the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba is one of the best movies about memory I've ever seen. Very little of the stories he tells about Winnipeg are entirely factually correct, but almost all spring from some grain of an actual historic incident, and they feel true in the way that the myths and lore that schoolyard children tell each other about a place feels true. The circular narrative structure moves back and forth between tall tales of Winnipeg history, ornery observations about the city's character and identity, and traumatic memories of Maddin's overbearing mother (played, in a nifty film-within-a-film device, by Detour's Ann Savage). All of these strands mingle together in the same soup. Memories fade and alter, but we can never escape our upbringing.I first saw this when I was 19, and enjoyed it (what's not to like?), but it's definitely one of those movies that benefits from living long enough to see everything you've known and loved be steamrolled in the name of what our wise local developers and city councillors believe is progress. My favourite section concerns Maddin's righteous indignation that the local Eaton's department store - once the very centre of the town's social and economic life - has been razed to build a shitty new arena that doesn't even have enough seats to accommodate an NHL team. And worse - the building of a new arena means the destruction of the old one. Businesses go bankrupt, but and society tells us to accept the inevitable march of progress, but isn't there more to a site than its commercial function, and do we have a responsibility to honour that? Can't we at least be allowed to mourn what we've lost? And can't we at least recognize this "progress" as not an invisible, inexplicable force, but a political decision made by people with motivations?

Will Sloan5.0

I find this movie emotionally overwhelming. The line about how if you miss a place enough, the backgrounds of the photos become more important that the people in them - I understand that.God bless Maddin for making an important motion picture in the year 2007 whose top-billed star was Ann Savage.