Director Guy Maddin Courtesy of IFC Films

The surreal films of Guy Maddin, who has been called Canada's David Lynch, always seem to return to his birthplace of Winnipeg. The black-and-white flickering scenes conjure up alternate, snow universes where it's possible for a magnificent baroness to have glass legs filled with beer (as in The Saddest Music in the World) or for orphans who live in a lighthouse to be secret subjects of scientific experiments (Brand Upon the Brain!).

Maddin's latest film, a highly personal look at Winnipeg commissioned by The Documentary Channel, is as much a meditation on the therapeutic salvation of exploring memory and the past as it is a lesson on the false memory of film. He calls My Winnipeg a "docu-fantasia" and admits to trying to cheat the objectivity of the documentary filmmaking tradition by wanting "to dress Winnipeg up for the rest of the world the way the rest of the world had been dressed up for me." In this exclusive chat, he talks about embracing his new scary yet satisfying approach to filmmaking, frozen horse heads in the snow, Winnipeg's fake Nazi invasion, and a Canadian prairie boy's dreams of a Soviet agitprop Page 3 girl.

The characters in your films frequently suffer from amnesia. In My Winnipeg, you too struggle with the nature of memory. Why the fascination? What is it about memory that makes it so important?
I am more amazed that it is not more important to other people somehow. We are all amnesiacs; it is what enables us to get through life. If we had to remember everything we had said and done, we would be paralyzed with horror. A little bit of amnesia is an important anesthetic. For me, the past is always in the present. It is something that interacts with the present constantly. And I don't mean sitting around nostalgically remembering about kindergarten. It is the way we remember when we see a hot stove element, not to touch it, or not to go out with that kind of person again — to have a constant backwards-and-forwards relationship with the past. Then on a more macro scale, there are big emotional connections to the past all the time that force practically everyone's hands with the way that they behave. They almost have no choice but to behave in certain ways because of their relationship with the past. So, it is just best to think as the past as not only going away but actually as being in the present at all times. I know that was a working manifesto for Faulkner, among other writers. You're defined by where you have been.

Lost memories, recovered memories, false memories, transplanted memories — they all present their own problems for a theory of consciousness. You make no attempt to differentiate between them, keeping the viewer as unsure about the validity of the memory as you are.
No, and my biggest regret was that I didn't have time to discuss the area of the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center which specializes in this really rare disorder which involves people who are, because of this affliction, forced to live in a perpetual state of deja vu. As they receive new data it is filed away as an older memory instantly. So if they are told that their mother just died, they say, "Oh, that's impossible. She died about eight months ago." So, there is still grief but it is all misfiled and it comes out in a jumbled way. So, I really wanted to talk about that but it was hard to back it up visually and I wanted to keep the movie at about 80 minutes long so I finally decided to get rid of it.

You use actors to attempt to re-create an unreliable past.
That was the best I could do because I was really thrilled to find actors that, oh man, did they look like my brothers. My mother had kept a lot of my brothers' clothing from that period so they got to wear my siblings' clothes. My old house had been subdivided into four so we were able to get one quarter of the place [including] the living room and my bedroom and the kitchen... So we used knickknacks and carpets and pieces of furniture and the clothing [from that time]. What shocked me was that the house smelled the same as it did decades earlier even though many other people had been living in there since then. There is still the DNA of its smell which is secreted somewhere in its plaster. And the sounds that certain floorboards made that I had forgotten would come back. There were times when, God, my knees would buckle beneath me and I would find myself plummeting past decades. It was really disturbing sometimes.