Stump the Guesser

When her daughter falls into a temporary coma after an accident at her home in Winnipeg, Sara, an overbearing Korean mother travels from Seoul to Canada and vows to keep her daughter safe forever by catfishing a husband for her online.

An adaptation of an unrealized script by Jean Vigo (Les lignes de la main), starring his late daughter, the critic, programmer, and actress Luce Vigo

A murder has been committed on a balcony. But it is only one of the many balconies attached to a large apartment block. Strange things are transpiring of each of them on loop. As the eye attempts to take them all in, the murder soon seems entirely unimportant.

A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…

A tribute to underground filmmaker Jack Smith. The film centers around a graphic transsexual orgy.

A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon, and a battalion of child soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas on life and love.

Guided by the spirit of “The Cuadecuc Manifesto” (coined by co-director Evan Johnson and inspired by Pere Portabella’s 1970 experimental cult documentary, Cuadecuc, vampir), Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton is a strange, stirring behind-the-scenes look at Paul Gross’s new feature, Hyena Road. Shot on location at CFB Shilo near Brandon, Manitoba, and in Aqaba, Jordan, the film mixes deep contrast black-and-white expressionism with wry and raw western revisionism reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, as it summons unwieldy, psychedelic energy from the main event. [TIFF]

Maddin’s frequent collaborator Evan Johnson (who is co-director on The Forbidden Room) presents four visuals essays, ranging from one and a half to four minutes in length: Puberty, Colours, Elms, and Cold, each representing a visual exploration of a specific theme.

short cine-essay by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson

En route to the annual G7 summit, the seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies get lost in the woods and face increasing peril while attempting to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis.

A deceased filmmaker experiences a posthumous dream in which he attempts to reunite with his wife. (Homage to Italian film director Federico Fellini in the year of the centennial celebration of his birth.)

short cine-essay by Evan Johnson and Guy Maddin

Thursday shot from filmmaker Galen Johnson's high-rise apartment during COVID-19 “lockdown” in Winnipeg, captures people going about their daily routines in the city's eerily empty streets, yards and parking lots, on their balconies and on the riverbanks. The extreme distance and the diminutive scale of humans is paired with sound close-ups—a combination that embodies the strange, heightened intensity of feeling of the time, knowing an era-defining tragedy is happening yet being so physically removed.