I seem to return to this short film every few years. Guy Maddin made it for a Canadian film festival. Twenty-two years ago, now. It’s under seven minutes long, and acts as a perfect distillation of a sector of Maddin’s interests as well as being a wonderful thing in its own right.
I first heard of Guy Maddin – and this dates me – in PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO MAGAZINE. PSYCHOTRONIC was the magazine we read to learn about the films we’d never get to see, and that’s where I learned of TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, complete with still photos. I was mesmerised just by the idea of the thing, the ideas in the thing and the images stolen from it. It took me until 2020 to own a copy, I think.
There is now an archive of forty scanned issues of PSYCHOTRONIC available online, which I will be diving into soon.
I suspect I’m going to put Maddin’s THE FORBIDDEN ROOM up on the big screen later. A film that’s still hard to find on digital media, but Amazon Prime Video has it at the moment.
