YOU MAY not know much about Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba in western Canada, but you will learn a great deal from Guy Maddin's personal and social history of the city he describes as "my home for my entire life".

Maddin reveals that he was born and breastfed in a dressing room at the city's ice hockey stadium; that Winnipeg has a graveyard for old signposts, and has 10 times more sleepwalkers than any other, and that some streets were named after popular prostitutes from a local brothel.

There's more. In 1919, striking workers were described as "Bolshevik rapists" in the local papers. In 1942, Rotary Club members organised "If Day", posing as Nazi invaders and renaming streets after Hitler and Himmler. And after an electrocuted squirrel triggered a racetrack fire, the fleeing horses were frozen in ice at what is now a lovers' rendezvous that resembles a chessboard.

My Winnipegis introduced as a Documentary Channel presentation, but it ought to be taken with substantial pinches of salt as Maddin lets his fertile imagination run wild for a wonderfully weird exercise accompanied by his admirably deadpan voiceover. Some autobiographical elements apparently are drawn from Maddin's past, which is recreated, hilariously at times, with 1940s B-movie star Ann Savage (from Detour) as his mother in this teasing blurring of fact and fiction.

Anyone familiar with Maddin's touchingly strange and strangely touching The Saddest Music in the World(featuring Isabella Rossellini as a glass-legged brewery owner) will be familiar with the director's outlandishly surreal imaginings and his penchant for affectionate pastiches of silent movies.

For an example of Maddin's distinctive style, and just how original and idiosyncratic his movies are, go to YouTube and savour his thrilling salute to cinema history in The Heart of the World (2000), which ranks at the forefront of the greatest short films ever made.