My Winnipeg (12A)

Writer-director Maddin was asked to make a documentary about his Canadian hometown of Winnipeg. Shot in black and white, with the director's dreamily poetic commentary as companion, the film presents an idiosyncratic odyssey through this "snowbound, sleepy" town, where Maddin has lived his whole life, and in doing so becomes a witty and affecting fantasia on the very nature of memory.

With the help of a small cast, he re-enacts episodes from his childhood, an eccentric and hilarious exercise. At times it is inspired by a righteous anger, yet this is only one aspect of a marvellous, fractured, incantatory memoir that raises Winnipeg, and film-making itself, to a thing of wonder.