My first ever exposure to “the mad poet of Manitoba” is this movie. Don’t know if it is the ideal entry point but I’m thinking pretty much any other of his stuff is gonna be equally as unideal (I saw some of his shorts also available on Criterion Channel and got that sense). I’ll admit I fell asleep the first time watching this about a third of the way through, yet I kept thinking about it and wanted to see more. He was apparently commissioned by the city officials to create a documentary about his hometown. What we get is definitely not a documentary in any conventional sense, but a strange and surreal combination of documentary footage, re-enactments of Maddin’s life, myths about Winnipeg, it’s topography, how it was founded, its taxi companies and long opinionated segments about past and present Hockey sports’ arenas. Yes, this one has all that and more. It is strange and great.