Guy Maddin’s body of work is as beautiful as it is confounding and delirious. He incorporates the language of past cinema, with which he is most intimately familiar from his countless hours of film viewing, and combines this with a pre-cinematic sensibility learned from the books he voraciously devours. A man of prodigious intellectual appetites, Maddin’s many interests and obsessions can easily be discerned in his work. Maddin’s work is critically engaged with the current status and future of independent filmmaking in our digital culture, as he has been one of those few filmmakers to successfully navigate between analog and digital media.
In 1995, Maddin was the recipient of the Telluride Medal for Life Time Achievement at the Telluride Film Festival. He is the youngest person ever to have been awarded this honor. Maddin is known for his short works such as The Heart of the World (2000) and My Dad is 100 Years Old (2005) as well as his feature films Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), The Saddest Music in the World (2003), Brand Upon the Brain (2006), and My Winnipeg (2007). At the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009 he premiered a new short film, Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair starring Isabella Rossellini, which was projected on the side of an office building. Maddin has been a regular contributor to Film Comment and The Village Voice. He has curated at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and has taught at the University of Manitoba.