Guy Maddin’s film My Winnipeg is the last movie I watched on my TV before it left for its new home. It is such a personal movie about home that it is a fitting start to my imagination recovery project. Besides the personal, there is a whole heaping dose of the creative as well. Usually Maddin is too esoteric for me. He’s one of those filmmakers whose wavelength you have to catch, and if you don’t, you are looking slack-jawed and glassy eyed wondering what the F* is this guy going on about?

I caught the rhythm of the stanzas that make up this visual poem. A young man trapped in the cold north, townsfolks who possess “just the right amount of wrong,” as a friend would say, and a city with some stunning moments in its history. But the glue that holds together the personal with the history of the city is Maddin’s own dysfunctional childhood. Hiring actors to recreate scenes from his childhood, he hopes that seeing them again will allow him adult insight into childhood hurts. Black and white, fantastic, and certainly pushing the boundaries of documentary, I’m actually surprised there wasn’t more of a discussion last year when the film was out about how it fits into the documentary canon. But, it’s also nice that people overwhelming appreciated the film and didn’t care to argue the labeling.

I’m happy this was the last movie I watched on my television set because last night, I was thinking about it and getting ideas for all of the possible projects I could start, or pick up where I left off with. My Winnipeg is such a beautiful collage of the personal combined with the historical, it almost sets a bar (for me, at least) for self-expression. Yes, it’s great to exorcise demons but great art is rarely personal only.