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.

His first film, produced through the Winnipeg Film Group, was the haunting family fable THE DEAD FATHER. This brought him the recognition he needed to embark on his second film, the cult hit TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL. This film played for months as a midnight movie in New York City and paved the way to perhaps his most delirious and insensible picture, ARCHANGEL. Certainly the most lyrical of war films, ARCHANGEL is the story of amnesiac lovers skirting the northern frontiers of World War I, and its release brought Maddin the U.S. National Society of Film Critics’ prize for Best Experimental Film of the Year.

Following this triumph was Maddin’s first work in colour, a story of repression and unnatural couplings entitled CAREFUL. The film opened Perspectives Canada at the 1993 Toronto Festival of Festivals and it went on to screen at the Tokyo and New York Film Festivals. In 1995 Maddin created a short filmic prose-poem based on the work of Belgian charcoalier ODILON REDON. It was organised by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who also invited such directors as Jonathan Demme, Jane Campion and Tim Burton. The resulting production won a Special Jury Citation at the Toronto Film Festival and played festivals from New York to London to Telluride, Colorado.

Also 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 honour, which he shares with such luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola, Gloria Swanson, Clint Eastwood, Leni Riefenstahl, Michael Powell and Andrei Tarkovsky.