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"I've never taken LSD and wandered around a film archive, but I imagine the experience might be similar to The Forbidden Room." – The Guardian
As a filmmaker, Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, MIFF 2008; Brand Upon the Brain!, MIFF 2007) has staked out a strange territory of his own for nearly three decades: a universe composed of silent film tropes, Freudian sexuality and offbeat humour. The Forbidden Room, co-directed with young collaborator Evan Johnson, is his boldest effort yet.
In this campy fever dream, plots of lost movies from the first decades of cinema are reimagined as short stories, cascading within each other like Raymond Roussel narratives; it is a trip that along its way takes in amorous skeletons, vampire bananas and an island-sized brain in the middle of the sea. Featuring cameos galore from myriad European arthouse stars, The Forbidden Room is a unique and essential experience.
"Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room is probably his crowning masterpiece ... a shadowbox of cinema's lost, non-existent, and parallel histories — into and out of which Maddin thrusts like a raving lunatic." – Cinema Scope