Guy Maddin

The big names behind the big stories. Laura Kuenssberg talks to those making the news, inside and outside politics.

En route to the annual G7 summit, the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies get lost in the woods and face increasing peril while attempting to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis.

An exploration of the cinematic history of the folk horror, from its beginnings in the UK in the late sixties; through its proliferation on British television in the seventies and its many manifestations, culturally specific, in other countries; to its resurgence in the last decade.

A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon, and a battalion of child soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas on life and love.

Gangster and deadbeat dad, Ulysses Pick, embarks on an unusual journey through his home.

Seances, co-created with the National Film Board of Canada, presents a wholly new way of experiencing film narrative. By dynamically generating a series of film sequences in unique configurations, potentially hundreds of thousands of new stories are conjured by code. Each will exist only in the moment—no pausing, scrubbing, or sharing—offering the audience one chance to see the generated film. This project, co-created by the ever imaginative Guy Maddin, is a visual discourse on the impact of loss within film. All the sequences pay homage to lost silent films from the early day of cinema. Seances is nostalgic but it is also frequently hilarious. Part of the joy and sadness of Seances is that many possible narratives are created but they can be only viewed once before they disappear forever.

A young woman named Savannah Knoop spends six years pretending to be a transgender writer named JT Leroy, the made-up literary persona of her sister-in-law.

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…

A medieval cult travels to the 20th century and kills people in an attempt to bring about the end of the world. The policeman must stop them by summoning the spirit of Nostradamus.

The geographical dead center of North America and the beloved birthplace of Guy Maddin, Winnipeg, is the frosty and mysterious star of Maddin’s film. Fact, fantasy and memory are woven seamlessly together in this work, conjuring a city as delightful as it is fearsome.

Set in a blazing land where the sun ceaselessly shines, this dramatic fantasy examines love’s darker aspects.

A cinematic version of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's adaptation of Bram Stoker's gothic novel Dracula. Filmed in a style reminiscent of silent Expressionist cinema of the early 20th century (complete with intertitles and monochrome photography), it uses dance to tell the story of a sinister but intriguing immigrant who preys upon young English women.

A deceased filmmaker experiences a posthumous dream in which he attempts to reunite with his wife. (Homage to Italian film director Federico Fellini in the year of the centennial celebration of his birth.)

After returning home to his long-estranged mother upon a request from her deathbed, a man raised by his parents in an orphanage has to confront the childhood memories that have long haunted him.

In Depression-era Winnipeg, a legless beer baroness hosts a contest for the saddest music in the world, offering a grand prize of $25,000.

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.

The mountain-village passions of a German widow and her sons unfold in the style of a 1920s expressionist movie.

It Came from Kuchar is the definitive, feature documentary about the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, the Kuchar brothers. George and Mike Kuchar have inspired two generations of filmmakers, actors, musicians, and artists with their zany, "no budget" films and with their uniquely enchanting spirits.

An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.