My Winnipeg is a love letter to an unloved city. The film seethes with frustration; it twists like a victim on the rack beneath the drip of provincialism and conventionality. “History is an intimidating continuum, a cataract of data. And those myths, abridged or simplified, of historical fact or outright fable, that’s how they help tote up an identity. Winnipeg needed its own version of that.”

Although Maddin conceived the film as a quickie, the process was anything but. His producer, Jody Shapiro, who shepherded The Saddest Music in the World and My Dad Is 100 Years Old, made multiple trips to Winnipeg, laying on the lash as Maddin struggled to find his subject. His Winnipeg. As well, Maddin was distracted by another film, Brand upon the Brain!, which had to be completed within a certain period to guarantee its financing. When he submitted his first draft of My Winnipeg, it was thrown back at him — a bracing moment he appreciates in hindsight. “Not enough documentary,” he says. The rejection threw him back on his artistic heels.

Maddin is the first to concede that other people’s Winnipegs made My Winnipeg. In preparing an early draft, he dragooned friends from his teenage years to tour the city, to revisit childhood playgrounds, bygone haunts, and places their parents and grandparents had visited, and perhaps warned them against. This idea was dropped, but the friends kept up their musings, rummaging through their mental attics for rumours and mysteries that were all the more outlandish because they turned out to be true. “It’s the intersection of our temperament and the actual Winnipeg that makes it, in a small-gestured way, the special place it is,” says Maddin. “There are no small gestures required for Paris, New York, or Rome. With Winnipeg, it’s small, and no one has noticed before.”

Witnessed from the point of view of a train car, the film weaves a journey — journeys upon journeys — through the past and across the topography of the city. The fatigued Winnipegger stares out the window at tableaux historic and postmodern. It’s an escape attempt disguised as a stroll down memory lane under the ever-watchful Mother, her giant eyes peering into the train window, “her lap, a magnetic pole, a direction from which I can’t turn for long.” Maddin’s narration is the tour guide: his city, his psyche.

During the trip, Maddin pauses to watch reimaginings from his early life. Back to the beginning, back to his childhood home, back to the Forks, his mother’s lap, the fur. He recreates his life in 1963, in the apartment above his Aunt Lil’s beauty salon, with actors playing his brothers and sister and a small pug playing the role of Toby, “our long, long, long-dead chihuahua.” Says the narrator, “Only here can I isolate the essence of what in this dynamic is keeping me in Winnipeg, and perhaps once this isolation through filmed re-enactment is complete I can free myself from the heinous power of family and city and escape once and for all.”

His sister returns home one evening, distraught. She has struck and killed a deer on the highway. But the mother knows otherwise: “I wasn’t born yesterday, dearie. Where did it happen? In the back seat?” What ensues is a Freudian nightmare as the mother, a baldly manipulative sorceress, transforms a car accident into a sex scandal. “No innocent girl stays out past ten with blood on her fender.” Such a line could only be found in a Maddin film.

Maddin’s genius lies in his balance. He performs a complicated tightrope act, treading the line between homage and mockery, nostalgia and kitsch, drama and camp. And he keeps the audience off balance while we watch, waiting for him to fall and for us to fall with him. My Winnipeg may be his greatest balancing act of all, particularly when the narration is delivered live from the stage.

He speaks of his burning need to shout out in defence of his little city. “The big ones get mythologized. Usually smaller places get remembered for disaster — Galveston. But cities die for other reasons. Michael Moore did it with Flint. I wanted to present it tonally, not politically . . . I wanted to show people what it’s like to live here in a mythic way.” Yet the stories are remarkably true, if not entirely accurate. Maddin also perilously treads the line between fact and fiction.

The Arlington Street Bridge spans the city’s rail yards. Manufactured at the Vulcan Iron Works of London, according to the film, it was originally intended for Egypt, there to span the Nile. But someone got the specifications wrong, and it was sold at a discount to bargain-crazy Winnipeg. “The bridge has not adjusted well to its always strapped foster home,” says the narrator. “And it often turns in its sleep when it is possibly dreaming of its lush and joyous originally intended home and pops a girder out of place . . . The sounds that groan up from the yard at night sound like the agonies of some colossal arthritis.”

Most of it is true, but not all of it is provable, let alone probable. The bridge was in fact built by the Cleveland Bridge Works. It was commissioned for Egypt, but there was nothing wrong with the specs; rather, no one took delivery. But it was indeed purchased at auction by the City of Winnipeg for considerably less than it would have cost new.