Canadian director Guy Maddin (1956) is one of the most eminent contemporary auteur filmmakers who skilfully stylises silent and early sound films. His eccentric and affected films are dreamlike and nightmarish. They possess a surreal quality that make you forget about cinema as an occult séance, but rather experience it as a serious excavation of a graveyard where images from the past and bodies alike are unfurled from their shrouds. There is also a hallucinogenic sense of humour, only outdone by the expressionistic laughter of Maddin’s protagonists. 

Maddin’s films have been screened several times at RIGA IFF and at the Arsenāls Film Festival. To mention just a couple: The Saddest Music in the World (2003), which is his first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, and My Winnipeg (2007). Over the last two decades, Maddin and Rossellini have made several short and feature-length films. In this conversation, Maddin will share a few chapters from a century of cinema where his path has crossed those of Isabella and her father Roberto Rossellini.