Guy Maddin鈥檚 body of work is as beautiful as it is confounding and delirious. He incorporates the language of past cinema, with which he is most intimately familiar from his countless hours of film viewing, and combines this with聽a pre-cinematic sensibility learned from the books he voraciously devours. A man of prodigious intellectual appetites, Maddin鈥檚 many interests and obsessions can easily be discerned in his work. Maddin鈥檚 work is critically engaged with the current status and future of independent filmmaking in our digital culture, as he has been one of those few filmmakers to聽successfully navigate between analog and digital media.
In 1995, Maddin was the recipient of the Telluride Medal for Life Time Achievement at the Telluride Film Festival. He is the youngest person ever to have been awarded this honor. Maddin is known for his short works such as聽The Heart of the World聽(2000) and聽My Dad is 100 Years Old聽(2005) as well as his feature films聽Cowards Bend the Knee听(2003),听The Saddest Music in the World聽(2003), Brand Upon the聽Brain (2006), and聽My Winnipeg聽(2007). At the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009 he premiered a new short film,聽Send Me to the 鈥楲ectric Chair聽starring Isabella Rossellini, which was projected on the side of an office building. Maddin has been a regular contributor to Film Comment and The Village Voice. He has curated at the UCLA Film and Television Archive and has taught at the University of Manitoba.