Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies, most recently Rumours (2024), starring Cate Blanchett and Roy Dupuis; as well as The Forbidden Room (2015), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003). He has also mounted over 70 performances of his films around the world, featuring live elements—orchestra, sound effects, singing, and narration—most recently The Green Fog (2016), which was accompanied live by the Kronos Quartet. His screenplay collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. His movies Archangel (1990) & The Heart of the World (2000) both won America’s National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Experimental Film. For the past 15 years, he has partnered with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson. Maddin started making collages to inspire screenplay ideas, plan shoots, teach himself about colour, and calm his nerves. He is now hooked on the practice. 

ABOUT

"After forty years of filmmaking, I have come to think of my life only in visual terms, in pictures sketched, jumbled up in almost no order at all, then remembered poorly. My autobiography would NEVER be a series of sentences packed into chapters that fill out a memoir that might sit on a shelf of books. Rather, what I recall of my time on this planet is laid out before me in sequences of something like movie storyboards, those elemental blueprints of filmic preparation, the syntax of cinematic expression itself. So, I've come to revisit and reread my past by shuffling through these pictorial vocabulary units. As with all memories, these are clustered, disorganized narratives, sometimes intensely emotional, sometimes utterly inconsequential—always fragmented. Sometimes the memories of my parents have surely been collaged onto my own. Maybe a memory is born only when two or more sensations collide? As in a collage! And all non-impacts are swiftly forgotten? Please sift through my recollected collisions kindly, for they are gentle and true."