The first film we made together, me and Guy Maddin, was The Saddest Music in the World. We met when Maddin sent me his incomprehensible script, the sentences, it was all so Baroque, I had never read such a complicated script. Lucky for me, however, he had sent me his films and one was only seven minutes long, Heart of the World: it was a film made of images that were all scratched, ruined, everything that, when we seek to restore films, we have always fought against. But that was his aesthetic. And so I discovered that there was a boy in Canada, in Winnipeg, who liked what we have never been interested in and knew cinema very well, and in these badly ruined images he had found the soul, the desperation of a cinema that was disappearing. I said to myself “this is a major talent”, and I went to see him in Winnipeg. I like working with experimental directors because in a certain sense they remind me of my father, who could have continued to make neo-realist films, turning them into a tearjerker-genre and making a box-office success of it, while on the contrary, he refused to do so and always sought new horizons. When I meet these directors, so obstinate in pursuing their experiments, from Lynch to Maddin, I feel at home. (Isabella Rossellini)
DIRECTOR: Guy Maddin
NATION: Canada
YEAR: 2003
RUNTIME: 100′
CAST: Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox, Ross McMillan, Louis Negin
Original version with subtitles