Justin Pickard

My Winnipeg (2007)

My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.

It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of  urban legends and familial traumas.

So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.