Maddin waves goodbye to Winnipeg

If sleepy, shivery Winnipeg did not exist, director Guy Maddin would probably have dreamt it up

A Canadian Lynch: Guy Maddin on the set of the film The Saddest Music in the World

Last Friday Guy Maddin screened his part-documentary, part-surrealist fantasy My Winnipeg at the 58th Berlin International Film Festival, an ode to the not-so-bustling capital of Manitoba, where during winter it's not uncommon for temperatures to dip into the minus 50s once you factor in the wind-chill. Maddin is a mad visual poet with a penchant for melodrama and the trappings of silent film, including intertitles, live narration and live musical accompaniment. He is part cinematic auteur, part trickster. He delights in hallucinatory melodrama, walking the line between real and imagined memories, thwarted and dysfunctional love, like a funnier, Canadian Louis Buñuel.

The world is full of artists, famous or not, who've disowned their shabby beginnings and reinvented themselves in centre-of-the-universe cities like New York, Paris or London. Maddin, while admitting his desire to escape, still sets many of his films in or near his home town, mythologizing its past while condemning its stiflingly parochial mindset. In My Winnipeg we're told the city is the sleepwalking capital of the world, where earlier this century an amusement park was trampled by stampeding bison, where once a dozen horses wandered into a lake only to have their outstretched heads frozen to the ice until spring came - need another reason to jump on that plane?

Maybe it's this crazy horse water, seeping into the soil over years, that has made the city such fertile creative ground. It was here that a 14 year old Neil Young formed his first band, the Jades, at Earl Grey Junior High School in 1960; here that the 20th century's most important media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, grew up; and here that future art stars The Royal Art Lodge would meet weekly to create their collective doodles in the mid-90s. And, though he doesn't exactly shout it from the mountain tops, the founder of Wallpaper and Monocle magazines, international style arbiter Tyler Brûlé, was born and raised here, his father having played for the local Roughriders and Blue Bombers gridiron football teams - how's that for 'Peg pedigree?

Electronic musician Venetian Snares (Aaron Funk), a favourite of John Peel's (the NME compared his music to "a drum machine being thrown down a flight of stairs"), is also from the 'Peg. Funk's feelings for the city are decidedly less warm and fuzzy than Maddin's, as evidenced by his 2005 hate letter of an album, Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole (where he samples dialogue from Maddin's film The Saddest Music In The World, which stars Isabella Rossellini as a beer baroness with beer-filled glass legs).

OK, so not all Winnipeggers are so tortuously cool and/or culturally relevant - Nia "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" Vardolos and 70s classic rock jocks The Guess Who and BTO are also from here. And even Maddin's epic love affair with the place looks as though it's finally coming undone: he recently announced that he's moving to Canada's very own pale imitation of a real, mythmaking centre-of-the-universe, Toronto. Oh, well. We can only hope Winnipeg will continue to spawn ground-breakingly weird artists. In the meantime, here's looking forward to Maddin's filmic interpretation of his soon-to-be-adoptive city.