Meet Guy Maddin, Canadian Auteur

While the movie industry descends upon Ontario's capital for the annual Toronto International Film Festival (which launched last night), those left out of the fun can seek solace in this short documentary about a new work by Canada's own Guy Maddin, "Brand Upon The Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters" (screening at the festival).

The eight-minute documentary examines Maddin on the set of the new film being shot in Seattle and Puget's Sound, the filmmaker's first outdoor shoot in some 18 years. If you've never seen Maddin's highly stylized set-design-heavy work, check out his absolutely must-see 2000 short "The Heart of the World." It gives a strong impression of the black-and-white fever-dreams he's been cultivating in features such as The Saddest Music in the World and Careful, and it was a favorite of the Toronto fest's millennial edition.

As described in the documentary, the new film – screening once in Toronto and then on Oct. 15 as part of the New York Film Festival – is a companion piece to Maddin's personal serial film Cowards Bend the Knee, shot once again on Super-8 cameras and concerning such topics as lighthouses, "orphanages in which the orphans are used for organ harvest," says Maddin, "not just love triangles, but love polyhedrons" and episodes from his own childroom, such as, he admits in his inimitable style, "battle royales between my mother and sister."