RUMOURS

“Compelled by the looming doomsdays with which we are become too familiar, seduced by the eschatological sinuosities inscribed provocatively across our sulphur-clotted skies, with nothing but hopelessness to console ourselves, and with our chill-blasted souls much in need of the warmth sometimes only nostalgia can provide, we directors have turned our despairing attentions, rosary beads chattering like teeth in our skeletal fingers, to the quaint old customs of diplomacy – namely the G7!” (Guy Maddin, Evan e Galen Johnson)

Guy Maddin has directed thirteen feature-length movies in a career spanning over thirty years. For the past decade, he has worked exclusively in directorial partnership with Evan and Galen Johnson, creating The Forbidden Room (2015), The Green Fog (2017), and the internet interactive, Seances (2016). During his solo helming years, Maddin mounted around the world over seventy performances of his films, Cowards Bend the Knee (2002), Brand Upon the Brain (2006) and My Winnipeg (2007) in productions featuring live elements – orchestra, sound effects, song and narration. His screenplay and film-story collaborators include Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and poet John Ashbery. In America, his movies Archangel (1990) and The Heart of the World (2000) won National Society of Film Critics Awards for Best Experimental Film.

Evan Johnson is a writer and filmmaker living in Winnipeg. He studied film and philosophy at the University of Manitoba and worked at Winnipeg’s Rug Doctor chemical bottling plant before being discovered there by Guy Maddin. He co-directed his first feature, the Forbidden Room (2015), with Maddin, and since then has been writing/directing with Maddin and his brother Galen Johnson.

Galen Johnson is an filmmaker and designer based in Winnipeg. In 2012, he worked as Production Designer, Title Designer, and Composer on The Forbidden Room, for which he was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for production design/art direction. He has since gone on to co-direct Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton (2015), the experimental short film website Seances (2016), The Green Fog (2017), Accidence (2017) and Stump the Guesser (2020) all with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson.