Guy Maddin is attempting to leave Winnipeg, the city in which he was raised. In order to so, though, he must consciously relive his youth there and try to find new meaning in his memories. He recruits his mother, hires actors to play his siblings, exhumes his father's corpse, and they move back to his childhood home. They reenact events as Maddin traces the history of the city and his relationship with it. The posters for this film read "Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg," which might be a more accurate title. Winnipeg is an intensely personal, extremely subjective look at the city of Winnipeg as the director, Maddin, knew it. The movie is like diving into Maddin's psyche, overtly Freudian but realistic at the same time. Its sometimes excessive surrealism weaves back and forth between solemn, wryly funny, and downright mystifying.
One has the impression throughout the entire thing that it is wrought with complex metaphors whose meaning we can only scratch the surface of, metaphors that Maddin understands completely. Its constantly bleary, sleepy focus and rhythmic editing put the viewer in the mindset of the sleepwalkers who pervade the city's streets. My Winnipeg is mesmerizing and alienating at the same time, filled to the brim with layered meaning and poignant images that create a believable composite of human memory.
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