Cycle index

My Dad Is 100 Years Old

dir. Guy Maddin / Canada 2005 / 16’

subtitles: Polish and English

retrospective: Guy Maddin A Trip to the Orphanage, Archangel, Berlin, Brand Upon the Brain!, Careful, Collage Party, Cowards Bend the Knee, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Footsteps, Glorious, Hospital Fragments, It's a Wonderful Life, It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, My Winnipeg, Nude Caboose, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Baloon Mounts Towards Infinity, Odin's Shield Maiden, Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair, Sissy-Boy-Slap-Party, Sombra dolorosa, Spanky: To the Pier and Back, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, The Dead Father, The Heart of the World, The Saddest Music in the World, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Workbooks Section index

Cast

Isabella Rossellini, Isaac Paz Sr.

Film description

My Dad is 100 Years Old is a recollection of Roberto Rossellini, shown here as a huge and soft belly speaking about morality as a foundation of cinema. This image is both funny and touching, even more so, due to the fierce on-screen discussion of master filmmakers: Rossellini, Selznick, Fellini, Hitchcock and Chaplin (all played by Isabella Rossellini). Although Maddin himself does not participate in the argument, but he is the winner in a way, speaking once again in a voice of post-modern nostalgia and persuading us that it is actually unimportant which genius creates 'real' cinema. In this film Maddin invokes ghosts, using memory as a medium, memory born out of love - Maddin's love for cinema and Isabella Rossellini's love for her father. (ar)