GUY MADDIN'S KEYHOLE EXPERIMENT

Guy Maddin, the world’s foremost cineaste planant, was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba: the coldest and most central city in North America. His filmic output to date – nine feature-length projects and innumerable shorts – is a remarkable canon of fantasia. Viewing a Maddin movie, short- or long-form, it’s hard not to conclude that there must have been some strange alchemy on the set – the pictures seem woven and filigreed rather than simply, bluntly “shot” as other movies are; and furthermore must have been magicked together by a team of pillow-sleeved artistes with a rouged, beret-clad Maddin shrieking directions in falsetto from a golden velvet throne floating atop a dais of honeyed mist.
However, he is, in person and on set, quite a normal man. His first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, appeared in 1988, and became a midnight-movie classic. His second, Archangel, won the U.S. National Film Critics Award for best experimental film. Since then he has won many other awards – including the Telluride Silver Medal for life achievement in 1995, the San Francisco International Film Festival’s prestigious Persistance of Vision award in 2006, and others – and created dozens of beguiling films in his unique personal style. These include such celebrated feature works as The Saddest Music in the World (2003); Brand upon the Brain! (2006); and My Winnipeg (2007).

Maddin is also a writer and teacher, and occupies the position of Distinguished Filmmaker in Residence at the University of Manitoba.

Keyhole Experiment is an ongoing collective collage project.