southtwelfth:

Guy Maddin’s six-minute short film The Heart of the World, from 2000.

Maddin will be providing live commentary for a screening of his The Saddest Music in the World tonight at the stunningly beautiful Heights Theater on Central Avenue. More information can be found here or here.

Aesthetic Apparatus also made an excellent poster for the event. “I love it. It’s as if you hired one of those brilliant Polish designers from the 60s!,” says Mr. Maddin. It’s true!

I am looking forward to this more than probably any other event I’ve attended in recent memory. Part of the excitement is that Maddin’s Winnipeg, the setting for all of his films, is so much like Minneapolis in so many ways — the cold, the light, the sadness, the sense of a forgotten past, the confused civic identity, the ice hockey — that it’s very easy to watch and imagine Minneapolis up there.

This is probably nuts, and maybe it’s just my own attachment to his films speaking, but I feel sometimes watching Saddest Music or My Winnipeg that there’s something about them I get as a northern viewer — some secret that me and everyone else living here is let in on that isn’t shared with his viewers living in warmer climates.