A critical hit at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, this delirious, multi-layered film is a cinematic dispatch from the weird world of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, the director of The Saddest Music in the World. The story of a man named Guy Maddin who returns to the abandoned lighthouse/ orphanage where his incestuous mother and sister roam the halls, was shot in otherworldy high-contrast black and white images on 8mm film. A murder mystery, the surreal film contains several demented subplots involving orphans, teenaged detectives, and an aerophone, a device that allows communication between any two people who are in love. Maddin's mad masterpiece is an homage to the hallucinogenic logic of early silent film: the Toronto premiere was accompanied by Foley artists and a singing castrato, the release version has a soundtrack with narration by Isabella Rossellini. "It's an astonishing film: weird, obsessed, drawing on subterranean impulses, hypnotic." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times) more at branduponthebrain.com 35mm
2006, b&w, 1 hour 35 minutes, Canada/USA