Bill's got a blog!

Yep, that Bill. He of the beard, the infectious enthusiasm and a thousand photocopies. Bill Greenwell.

These days it seems he can be found thinking out loud in here - doubtless much more conducive to the task than those strangely impermanent windowless rooms up at Tremough...

[sighs wistfully, and gets all nostalgic for the MA days...]

My Winnipeg

The unconscious of a filmmaker. The unconscious of a city. Merged in a fever-dream.

That's my best attempt at summing up My Winnipeg, the film I saw at The Poly this evening. The poster calls it a 'docu-fantasia'. Either way (and both ways), it's definitely the only film I've ever seen that credited a 'Tapioca Wrangler'. A detail that at once seems utterly relevant, utterly misleading, and as distinctive as the film itself.

Film contains: snow; sleepwalking; Surrealism; attempted leaving; hilarious short experiments in family psychodrama; psychogeography; critical nostalgia; brilliance; and as much to inspire and haunt the memory as you'll find in many a good book (it's brilliantly filmic, but at the same time you can't help thinking about the best experimental literature).

The highlight: rediscovering that feeling of being in a cinema and - for a whole movie - having absolutely no idea at all what's coming next - it was like spending 80 minutes in the company of a long-lost friend (there was even that initial awkwardness - in other words, if the opening ten minutes or so seem hard going, they're more than worth it).

If only it hadn't been the last showing - I kept getting distracted by short story ideas...

Trailer time: