Beloved by critics and cineastes alike, filmmaker Guy Maddin nonetheless remains a mystery to the majority of multiplex mavens. To coincide with the release of My Winnipeg—a hilarious ficto-documentary in which the eccentric director details his love-hate affair with his hometown—here’s a selective, subjective crash course in Maddin’s delirious oeuvre.

FOR BEGINNERS
The Saddest Music in the World (2003) remains Maddin’s most mainstream effort, but is no less strange for it. The story of a Depression-era contest devoted to creating the most mournful music, it stars Isabella Rossellini as a fetching brewery baroness with beer-filled glass legs.
For fans of: Gold Diggers of 1935, Blue Velvet

THE CANON
Maddin’s comic and surreal first feature, Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988) is set in a Manitoba sanatorium at the turn of the 20th century. Teeming with the fabulist’s signature obsessions, it tackles Icelandic myth, unrequited love, silent cinema and male rivalry.
For fans of: Eraserhead, L’Atalante

The Heart of the World (2000) was Maddin’s great comeback after the misfire that was Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival for its 25th anniversary, the melodramatic six-minute short—an homage of sorts to Soviet-era silent film—imagines a world quite literally saved by love.
For fans of: Metropolis, Battleship Potemkin

PURE GENIUS
Billed jokingly by the filmmaker as a “pro-incest” movie, Careful (1992) chronicles life in a 19th-century alpine village where even the smallest noise can trigger a devastating avalanche. Against this dreamy backdrop—filmed in lurid, expressionistic colour—two young men study to become butlers while navigating their complicated romantic desires.
For fans of: The Wizard of Oz, Spanking the Monkey

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) was created as an installation for the Power Plant, and is his most outré work to date. This tale of a hockey player—named Guy Maddin—who abandons his girlfriend in an abortion clinic–cum–beauty parlour is film noir gone horribly perverse.
For fans of: The Last Seduction, West of Zanzibar

CULTISTS ONLY
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs was Maddin’s first foray into big budgets and (sort of) big-name actors: Shelley Duvall and R. H. Thomson. The result was a disappointment to both the director and his fans, but it boasts some of Maddin’s most luscious imagery—and a campy plot that, unsurprisingly, turns on the vagaries of love.
For fans of: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre

My Winnipeg opens in select theatres across Toronto on Feb. 22.