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When confronted with Guy Maddin’s latest film, My Winnipeg, it is difficult to know what to make of it. Is it a dream; is it reality; is it memory? Somehow, the answer to all three is a resounding, “Yes.” Maddin was commissioned by The Documentary Channel and My Winnipeg was the unique and fantastical end result. Almost unrecognizable as a documentary if compared with the typical fare, Maddin admitted, “I’ve never made [a documentary] before and some would say I still haven’t.”

I don’t know whether or not My Winnipeg is a documentary, but I do know that it’s unlike anything I have ever seen and that there’s something about its honesty that makes me trust and respect it. The film doesn’t conform to its genre and instead of Maddin reconstituting his own odd and at times absurd style to fit the documentary mold, he reshapes the documentary to fit his own vision. As Ebert described in his review of the film, “[Maddin] rewrites history; when that fails, he creates it.”

The loosest concept of the film is that Maddin rents the home he grew up in for one month, hiring actors to play his brothers and sister, while allowing his mother to play herself and his girlfriend’s dog Spanky, to play the role of his “long dead, dead Chihuahua.” Already, in this simple sentence of introduction, Maddin’s strange sensibilities rear their heads for despite the film’s pronouncement that his real mother is playing his mother, she isn’t. She’s actually played by Ann Savage. From there, the film spirals into a beautiful and dream-like odyssey and it feels impossible to tell the difference between reality and fiction.

Maddin described his reasoning for allowing the film to take the shape that it does by saying, “Once I decided that it was my Winnipeg and nobody else’s I could conduct all the research I needed here, in my heart.” He later continues saying, “It’s less about Winnipeg and more about me.” And in a way, this begins to sum up what My Winnipeg really is: Maddin’s Winnipeg.

However, in being Maddin’s Winnipeg, with the fork of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, “If Day,” and Maddin’s own “white block house,” it encourages the audience to consider their “Winnipeg,” so to speak. Ebert himself touched on this notion remarking, “This film is uncanny in the way it reminds me of growing up in Urbana.” By reconstructing his own memories about the place he grew up, Maddin pushes his audience to return their thoughts to their own home towns and this is the real beauty of Maddin’s jumble of fact, fiction and memory.

Maddin described his style as his attempt to recreate the “narcotic tingle [that] I imagine poetry’s supposed to feel like when it’s getting you.” His films, My Winnipeg in particular, have a sense of freedom this way. Unconcerned with technical perfection, Maddin insists that he’s “unlearned the few things I’ve learned about filmmaking.” The way Maddin sees it, one must “Embrace that kindergarten ethos… You’d never tell a kid in an art class, ‘Oh, that drawing’s pretty good, but it could be better… Do it again.’” If there are mistakes in his films, and there are, he says, Maddin doesn’t mind. It’s the overall impression that matters; it’s the heart of the film that matters.

My Winnipeg, for Maddin (and for me), “represents a big litany of desires and events… it represents truths.”