So, Guy Maddin's new film My Winnipegis out next week and Guy's in London and Cambridge doing Q&As, interviews and live commentary events. This is partly a shameless plug as the film is being distributed by my husband but mostly a sincere thread, being as how Maddin is usually very good.

There's also a competition which might be of interest...

It's got pretty good reviews here. I'd be interested in what AG has to say (as he's a Portage and Main kid n'all.)

Saw a trailer this evening and it lookes pretty interesting. It was before Charles Burnett's Killer Of Sheep, which needs its own thread. Fa

I haven't seen it yet. Maybe next week. My brother saw it (and interviewed Maddin for the Globe) when it showed at the TIFF last fall and he really liked it.

Winnipeg is a hard place to get out of your system. I haven't lived there for 20 years, but if asked by a Canadian where I'm from, I will always answer "Winnipeg". I think that's true of most of my friends, too.

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I think that's true of most of my friends, too.

He's right. I say that and I've never even been to Winnipeg.

I've seen this, it's great. I'm still not totally sure why Winnipeg is "a hard place to get out of your system," but clearly Maddin feels the same way. It looked fairly mundane to me. Someone should really make a proper version of the fictional TV show, Ledge Man, that features in the film.

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I'm still not totally sure why Winnipeg is "a hard place to get out of your system,"

My wife doesn't get it either.

Look, I lived in Montreal for a much greater part of my adult life and by any even vaguely objective comparison, it's ten times the city Winnipeg is. But I don't miss it anywhere near how I miss Winnipeg.

In spring and summer, at least.

A good friend of mine is a transplanted Winnepegonian. I've never heard him wax nostalgic about the place, but perhaps he's embarrassed by the tears he'd shed. I'll ask.

"Winnipegger". We're called "winnipeggers".

I know. I was teasing.

I thought you might be. But I was worried you might be leading other poor souls astray.

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In spring and summer, at least.

Isn't summer their 'get your ass chewed off by mosquitoes' season?

I don't know why anyone who hasn't lived in Winnipeg would like the film - I imagine the self-referential stuff would come off a bit wanky, and you wouldn't know which bits of Winnipeg history are true and which are BS (most are true, believe it or not) - but I think it's an incredibly romantic film.

I loved it. Probably helped that he's from my hood, and most of the places and events he's talking about are places I used to see every day. I almost cried when he showed the Arena coming down.

My wife is incredulous that I found it romantic, but I did. Of course, there was a more tradtionally romantic movie to be made there: Carol Shields' The Republic of Love, which is one of the greatest meditations on love of the 20th century. But then that bitch Deepa Mehta filmed it and turned it into a story about fucking Toronto.

People steal from Winnipeg all the time. The city's dying as a result. That's what Maddin's movie's about.

I thought it was ace and I've never been to Winnipeg (only place I've ever been in Canada is Vancouver). It started slowly, and for the first quarter of an hour I though it might be just too artsy, but after a while it became utterly beguiling.

AG - was the horses heads thing true? A web search seems to suggest people think it was, but nowhere is there anything conclusive.

I'd never heard that one and I seriously doubt it.

The other sequence that was nonsense was Happyland being destroyed by a buffalo stampede, not least of all becasue they were basically extinct at the time. Pretty much everything else was true, though.

I just mentioned the horses heads thing to my Dad on the phone to see if he'd ever heard of it, and curiously he mentioned a book called Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte, which also mentioned this incident (though in northern Europe, not Canada).

But this book apparently also was a curious blend of fact and fiction, which my dad claimed was very difficult to separate. He said he'd never been sure of the veracity of the horses heads story there either.

Maybe Maddin consciously referenced Malaparte, knowing that the work was of a similar style?

P.S. I've just done a search for this work, and found a discussion of it here. Search on 'horses' on that page, and you'll find the story.