As if Guy Maddin?s My Winnipeg didn?t have enough absurdly hilarious moments to keep an audience in stitches, he had to up the ante with a reference to the city?s proclivity for bison stampedes!

The bizarre documentary blends factual accounts like the loss of the Winnipeg Jets, the demolition of Eatons Department Store and personal memories with outlandish fantasy recreations and Maddin?s trademark dark and mysterious visual style.

Here are highlights from a Q and A at the Manulife Centre on Sunday:

Audience Member: I noticed Anne Savage?s name in the credits.  Is that the same Anne Savage from Detour?

Guy Maddin:  Yes Anne Savage was in this unbelievable noir, poverty row classic Detour.  She hadn?t been on the big screen?since 1955.  (applause)  She was excited about coming here but she was not well.

AM:  I think we both lived in Winnipeg, but I lived in a different city I believe, I?m curious if there?s anything about Winnipeg you like?

GM:  You?re the one that left. (laughter, applause)  I love it all.  I?m going back there tomorrow, it?s my home.  I don?t know, making the film I sometimes felt like a petulant, sulking child running away from home.  Or going up to his room and imagining his own funeral and imagining how sad everyone would be at it.  And then I got hungry and had to come back and eat at the family table.  I think by being so incredibly specific there?s universality.  I realized while daydreaming about the city there are thousands of different Winnipegs.  It?s not just your hometown, but your family, a place, a time, all those things are stacked together.  You end up spending a lot of time thinking about yourself when making a movie like this and I?m really glad I don?t have to do it anymore.

AM: I?m wondering about the writing and how it mutated and evolved in the making of the film?

GM:  The movie was an assignment from the documentary channel.  I was broke and needed to make a movie. So I asked to be assigned something and I was assigned Winnipeg.  I had some historical events I?d known about for a long time in Winnipeg I wanted to get out there, some favourite things.  So I walked the dog a lot and daydreamed about how these things might interconnect.  Then we shot a bunch of stuff and in the editing process ? normally we edit to music ? this time, I went into a recording studio and recorded some of my rants and ramblings about Winnipeg, then the editor treated those narrations as temp music and cut to them. 

AM:  Were you influenced or inspired by documentaries from an earlier era.  This reminded me of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.

GM:  I do love Symphony of a Great City, gosh thanks for including me in the same sentence with these unbelievable masterpieces.  I was emboldened by them.  I was really just sort of groping my way along, and I really needed a lot of feedback from my producer and Michael Burns who commissioned the film.  So when I discussed outlines I really had to justify my approach. And Michael was good at massaging me to a position that I was comfortable with, but he as director of the Documentary Channel, not the fiction channel had to be comfortable too.

AM:  Is there a Happy Land Sign in Winnipeg?

GM:  Yes, it was trampled in a Bison stampede.  I know Torontonians are very jealous we?ve had a bison stampede in the last century and you haven?t but I?m sure if you look at your past far enough you?ll find one.

AM:  I?m from the west as well, and I notice the demolition of places of memory.  You really embrace nostalgia in the film, and I?m wondering why people in the west hate nostalgia so much?

GM:  Whenever I got near some of the people responsible I smelled sulfur, so I have no idea.