Guy Maddin

With a sterling reputation as an artist, filmmaker, and member of the avant garde, Guy Maddin began steadily increasing his place in the public consciousness as soon as he started his career in the early '80s. Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1956, Maddin's early life was marked by tragedy when his teenage brother Cameron committed suicide in 1963 and his father passed away in 1977. After studying economics at the University of Winnipeg, Maddin held down a series of odd jobs before re-enrolling at school to take film classes. There, he met his future collaborator John Paizs, and became interested in the films of Salvador Dali and David Lynch. Soon Maddin was appearing in Paizs' films and on the satirical cable access talk show "Survival," in which he discussed the supposedly impending apocalypse under the pseudonym "Concerned Citizen Stan" while wearing a mask. In 1985, he made his directorial debut with the short film "The Dead Father" (1985), a surrealistic look at a son's feelings of anger and despair about his recently deceased father, who returns from the dead to cause his family additional struggle. He would continue to produce critically acclaimed works over the coming years, including the feature films "Archangel" (1990) and "The Saddest Music in the World" (2003), both of which won the Best Experimental Film award from the National Society of Film Critics, and "My Winnipeg" (2008), which won Best Canadian Film at the 2008 Toronto Film Critics Association Awards. Maddin would also create "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003), a film that was originally commissioned as part of an installation art project by Toronto art gallery The Power Plant. He would also produce the films "Hauntings" (2010), "Only Dream Things" (2012), and "Seances" (2012) as art installations. With these projects, Maddin began collaborating with partner Evan Johnson. Maddin and Johnson then co-directed and co-wrote the feature film "The Forbidden Room" (2015), which became an underground sensation, meeting with near universal acclaim.