Maddin's My Winnipeg to open Berlin festival showcase

The Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival next February will open with Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, a quirky homage to his home city.

The Forum section of the Berlinale, considered one of Europe's top three film festivals, is devoted to avant-garde and experimental films.

My Winnipeg and Italian filmmaker Isabella Rossellini's short films Green Porno were announced this week as the headliner international premieres for the category.

A performance installation by Winnipeg filmmaker Noam Gonick and Peruvian-Canadian artist Luis Jacob also has been accepted at the festival, slated to run Feb. 7-17.Wildflowers of Manitoba features a young man slumbering underneath a geodesic dome. Four different projectors show "idyllic fantasies" of four young men living off the grid in a survivalist camp on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

The videos, projected on the dome, invoke 1970s style communal living and sexual freedom and are set to music by Québécois rock band Harmonium.

The installation premiered at the Montreal Biennale and later made an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Wildflowers of Manitobaalso opens Friday at the Plug In Gallery in Winnipeg, where it will run until Jan. 26.

Maddin, one of Canada's most innovative filmmakers, will narrate My Winnipeg as it plays in one of its Berlin screenings.

His film, which showed in September at the TIFF, features scenes from Winnipeg history intercut with fantasy images drawn from Maddin's own memory.

It was named best Canadian feature at TIFF and was recentlynamed asone of the Top 10 filmsat the festival.

Maddin worked with Rossellini on My Dad Is 100 Years Old, her biography of her father, filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, which was a highlight of the 2006 Berlin festival. Isabella Rossellini also starred in Maddin's film The Saddest Music in the World.

Rossellini's Green Porno is a series of films made for cellphones about insects mating.