Louis Negin

Guy Maddin’s ultimate epic phantasmagoria. Honouring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within. Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson take us high into the air, around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child, The Forbidden Room is Maddin's grand ode to lost cinema. Created with the help of master poet John Ashbery, the film features Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Dupius, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adèle Haenel, Amira Casar, Elina Löwensohn and Udo Kier (and more!) as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.

Keyhole is a rousing 1930's gangster picture set in a haunted house. It is a ghost sonata in which dream and waking life are seamlessly blended to isolate and expose universal feelings. A gangster and deadbeat father, Ulysses Pick, returns home after a long absence. He is toting two teenagers: a drowned girl, Denny, who has mysteriously returned to life; and a bound-and-gagged hostage, who is actually his own teenage son, Manners. Confused, Ulysses doesn't recognize his own son, but he feels with increasing conviction he must make an indoor odyssey from the back door of his home all the way up, one room at a time, to the marriage bedroom where his wife Hyacinth awaits, full of cancer, grieving over the deaths of her three children, and wooed by Ulysses' arch-rival, Chang. The house is haunted by countless dead relatives. Ulysses eventually reaches his goal and vanquishes his enemy, but the equilibrium of the house has been disturbed. Perhaps this has all been a dream that is dreamt every night by Manners himself or by the ghosts he loves so much.