Issue 17

If you are yet to experience the madcap brilliance and perverse beauty of Guy Maddin’s films, now is your chance to see them in their full glory on a big screen. To coincide with the release of the Canadian director’s latest, My Winnipeg, a uniquely oblique celebration of his hometown, the BFI Southbank are holding a retrospective of his work this month. Having been seduced, thrilled and enchanted by Maddin’s surreal, silent-period-inspired films, we are incredibly excited to be able to devote our July issue to him: we have a feature on his mythologising of Winnipeg, an interview with Cecilia Araneda, director of the Winnipeg Film Group and an interview with Maddin himself.

We also report from the Edinburgh Film Festival, which moved to an earlier June spot this year, with features on the new Under the Radar section and a round-up of the best films of the festival. We also have a review of Errol Morris’s new film Standard Operating Procedure, released this month. Morris appeared in Edinburgh for an on-stage interview, in which he discussed the ramifications of his documentary on the Abu Ghraib torture photos. And we have interviews with actors Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter as well as director Olly Blackburn, part of the team behind Donkey Punch, one of the eagerly awaited new British films that premiered in Edinburgh.

This month’s cinema releases also include a classic of 60s Cuban cinema, Memories of Underdevelopment, Tom Kalin’s beautiful, risqué Savage Grace, terrific new animé Origin: Spirits of the Past, and Nicolas Roeg’s latest, Puffball. In addition, we review one of the most notable films screened at the Tiger Festival last month, The Case, and we have a report on the Fashion in Film Festival.

In the DVD releases, we continue our exploration of Nagisa Oshima’s early work with Violence at High Noon and take a look at slick French sci-fi thriller Chrysalis and Žižek! a documentary on the Slovenian philosopher.

In the Short Cuts, we talk to the mastermind behind the brilliantly innovative straight 8 competition while Bochum Welt is our guest in the Film Jukebox.

The Electric Sheep Magazine team