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Focus on Guy Maddin

Archangel

Guy Maddin

Canada1991 83min DVD B&W Asian Premiere

Synopsis

Lt. John Boles, a one-legged soldier, is assisting the White Russians in the Russian Arctic during World War I. He finds himself in Archangel, a crystalline city of spires and domes, inhabited by some very confused people. Boles loves Iris, who is dead, and meets Veronkha, whom he mistakes for Iris. But Veronkha is already married to Philbin, who forgets he is married to Veronkha. 

Diretor

Guy Maddin

Born in 1956 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Guy Maddin studied economics at a university in Winnipeg. Before making films, he worked in a bank after college. Most of his films are made in his hometown, where he still lives. He never reads critic’s reviews on his films; he reviews his own films for The New York Times; he inserts personal chats, rather than explanatory commentary, with the producer and the writer for DVD release of his films. Maddin is just as eccentric as his films. His films have been already screened in the international film festival circuits, such as Toronto, New York, and Tokyo, and in 1995, the Telluride Film Festival awarded Guy Maddin who was barely forty at the time the Life-Time Achievement Award. Websites that pay a tribute to Guy Maddin and his films abound on the Internet. Some film critics pay eulogy to him as “a new hope in filmmaking of the new millennium.”