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Focus on Guy Maddin

The Tale from the Gimli Hospital

Guy Maddin

Canada1988 72min 16mm B&W Asian Premiere

Synopsis

Einar, a lonely fisherman, is stricken with the dreaded pestilence and finds himself in the crowded and filthy Gimli Hospital. Here he meets Gunnar, a friendly, bespectacled, rather rotund gentleman. The two men quickly become friends. Einar, however, turns jealous over the portly, jovial Gunnar’s ability to woo the beautiful Gimli Hospital nurses. When they reveal their darkest secrets to each other, the two men become bitter enemies. 

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.”