Born and raised in Winnipeg, that gritty, idiosyncratic former prairie boom town, Maddin is the most errant in a town of errant sons. Burton Cummings, Randy Bachman, even Marcel Dzama: they left; Maddin stayed. Held on for dear life. There was nowhere else to go, especially if you make movies the way Maddin makes them. To shoot in black and white — as he has done with all but two of his films — is to instantly decimate your potential audience, and income. With one exception, he shot all his films in Winnipeg using the same studio he painted black more than twenty-five years ago. To this list of career-limiting choices we can now add the making of a documentary about Winnipeg.

The idea for My Winnipeg did not, however, come from Maddin himself. Michael Burns, then commissioning editor at the Documentary Channel, had backed Maddin’s short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a homage to Italian film director Roberto Rossellini written and performed by his daughter, Isabella. Burns asked Maddin if he had ever considered making a documentary proper.

Maddin envisioned a production along the lines of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, a 1927 film that captured a day in the life of that distant pre-war city. Ruttmann’s film is noteworthy as much for its images of the long-lost Berlin of the Weimar era (the decadent and sybaritic Berlin of Brecht and Isherwood) as for its kinetic blending of image and film to capture the shifting rhythms of urban life from daybreak until night. A silent film not just about the people of the city — happy, sad, suicidal — but the city itself: trains, presses, shop dresses, machinery, the vast clockwork of a metropolis in all its grandeur.

Maddin imagined a voice-over narration lifted from the pages of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the controversial turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian writer and author of The Triumph of Death, whom Maddin describes as a “rebel, hero, megalomaniac, and soi-disant visionary, all charismatic stuff for me.” D’Annunzio’s words would be intoned by a reincarnation of the stentorian Lorne Greene.

But, says Maddin, in one of several interviews since the screening, “I always had far too much fear of and respect for documentaries to consider doing one.” Fear more than respect. Maddin hates research. Moreover, he detests the received wisdom that in documentary production the real work begins in the edit suite, after all the material is shot. “Documentary seemed to require so much discipline and problem solving and an infinite number of choices. A narrative has a script, and you have to get from A to B. In a documentary, the order in which it’s presented, the entire film, can all be changed.” The prospect, he said, “was nut-shrivelling. I filed the idea in whatever folder you have for ‘overheard compliments.’”

But then Maddin went broke. He called Burns and asked if the Documentary Channel was still interested. Burns asked him what he wanted to make a film about. “He was a bit puzzled that I had no idea,” says Maddin. “I asked him to assign me something.”

Burns, who had been to Winnipeg twice in his life, and then only briefly — first on a vintage train en route to a Terrence Malick production, and again during a visit to the set of My Dad Is 100 Years Old — suggested a film about the trains of Winnipeg. Or even a film about Winnipeg itself. Maddin agreed to the commission. But he had his doubts.

In a 2005 email outlining his original concept sent to Michael Burns, Maddin wrote:

To me, Winnipeg is a supernatural city of enchanted palimpsests, stories and memories piled on top of one another. Some of these narratives have been completely covered up by time before new histories were written over top of them; other stories bleed through and persist in being legible at all times. The narratives mix and mingle with all eras and confuse us Winnipeggers, we who can never quite remember what year it is at any given time.

“I love myths,” says Maddin, “whatever essence has come from the boiling-down process of history. Americans think of themselves as the sum of a number of myths, Washington chopping down the tree, Abe freeing the slaves, things that are vaguely and shallowly understood. Like the idea that classic movies begin and end with Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life.”