THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

By Guy MADDIN, Evan JOHNSON

ARSENAL - INSTITUT FÜR FILM UND VIDEOKUNST - as DISTR Theatrical, GERMANY

Drama - Completed 2014

A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon, and a battalion of child soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas on life and love.

Festivals
& Awards

Sundance Film Festival 2015
New Frontier
Berlinale - Berlin IFF 2015
Forum
Toronto - TIFF 2015
Wavelengths
    • Year of production
    • 2014
    • Genres
    • Drama
    • Countries
    • CANADA
    • Languages
    • ENGLISH
    • Duration
    • 130 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Guy MADDIN, Evan JOHNSON
    • EIDR
    • 10.5240/E264-EAD5-2005-748F-CB9E-N
    • Synopsis
    • If Canadian wunderkind Guy Maddin is Winnipeg’s own living film legend, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is his ultimate epic phantasmagoria. Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within. Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin takes us high into the air, around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is Maddin’s grand ode to lost cinema.