Toronto -- Guy Maddin, who announced plans yesterday to start filming a short feature to honour the National Film Board of Canada turning 70, says he hopes it will be "kind of dreamy and moving ... and if it's accidentally funny I'll also claim full responsibility for that intent."
Reached yesterday, the Winnipeg director explained the concept for his upcoming short, entitled Night Mayor, a cinematic riff on the significance of a public film producer.
"I'm kind of modelling it after Paul Tomkowicz's little, nine-minute profile of a little nobody, busy sweeping the street car tracks in Winnipeg in 1953. I love the simple, naturalist poetry of that work, and I'm going to try to make this profile of a person stand in for the NFB itself."
Maddin, whose past features include The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg, starts shooting Night Mayor early next week, and hopes to hand it to the NFB by the end of the month.
When first approached by the NFB to work on the mini-homage, Maddin admits he "resisted it at first." But then he immersed himself in the NFB archives (looking for historical footage to use in My Winnipeg) and got hooked on the 50-year-old cinematic material.
"I was astounded to find that the films were so beautifully made. And I was both thrilled and saddened to find these were some of the best Canadian films I'd seen. There I had been chastising our national inability to self-mythologize, and these filmmakers have long been quietly doing exactly that."
Source: globeandmail.com
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