The 1000 Eyes of Dr Maddin

Guy Maddin, who has been nicknamed the Canadian David Lynch, is doubtlessly one of the last remaining Magus of cinema. Despite living in the middle of the digital age, this heretical director hailing from the snowy plains of Canada has spent 25 years transposing the uncommon and the uncanny onto screens over-saturated with naturalistic imagery. A lover of primitive cinema, he has cunningly summoned the light-and-shadow techniques and experimentations of the Golden Age of film to resuscitate a unique cinematographic language which plays with the spectator's unconscious by means of visual trickery as disturbing as it is absurd. With a fetishist's taste for every kind of psychic deviation, he cheekily slips a bric-a-brac of iconographic elements from his own biography into each of his nine feature films (as well as a good twenty shorts). In an attitude as playful at that Maddin's films this documentary follows the mediumistic experiments of this master of illusion, filmed during the ''spirit'' shootings he presented in Europe. (Venice International Film Festival)