Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin has tried more than once to land a Heritage Minute.
But his pitches, including an āexperimental dance filmā about disgraced Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson, were just too strange, he guesses, for Historica Canada to indulge.
So heās brought his own version to the 44th Toronto International Film Festival this year with his feature film debut "," a warped take on a young William Lyon Mackenzie King.
āItās one part Canadian Heritage Minute and one part ayahuasca death trip,ā he told CTNews.ca ahead of the festival, where the film has its world premiere Tuesday in the Midnight Madness program.
"The Twentieth Century," which stars āWorkin' Momsā actor Dan Beirne as the future PM, is based on real people and incidents āfed through a very surreal prism,ā said Rankin. Billed by TIFF as a āHeritage Minute from hellā and a ābizarro biopic,ā it follows the early days of a young Mackenzie King through a series of humiliations as he hurtles toward top office.
The script is based on actual people and events and letters written between 1897 and 1902, when he was in his 20s. Some lines of dialogue are pulled directly from the original text. Otherwise events are āreprocessed,ā said Rankin.
āI describe this movie as a nightmare that (Mackenzie King) might have had around 1899,ā he said. āI spent a lot of time reading the diary. A lot of times Iād fall asleep while reading it. Iād wake up and I couldnāt remember exactly what I had dreamed or read. The script kind of emerged out of that.ā
In one surreal sequence, Mackenzie King competes in a leadership contest involving ribbon cutting, āendurance waiting,ā baby seal clubbing and urinating oneās name in the snow. Throughout the film, he struggles with a fetish for womenās footwear, which has an unsettling connection to a cactus.
The fetish is not fact. Instead, Rankin calls it a ātransmogrificationā of details, based on ārepressed erotic feelingsā identified in the diaries where Mackenzie King wrote of sinning and committing horrible acts, said Rankin. Words are crossed out and pages were ripped from the book. The theory among many historians is that Mackenzie King , but that is unconfirmed. Rankin simply chose to go a different direction to fill in the blanks.
āItās a question of ecstatic truth,ā he said. āHistorians draw that conclusion because itās the most educated guess they could make. It does nonetheless remain a fiction and it remains an artistic operation. I am definitely riffing off of that. I am giving into the artistic workings of historical reconstruction.ā
Fact or fiction, Rankinās film is an uncommonly surreal, darkly comic depiction of Canada. He knows his brand of patriotism is not in line with Canadian-focused media such as Heritage Minutes and "Anne of Green Gables." Thatās the way he likes it.
āThe way that we often represent Canada is this comforting reassuring, vanilla ice cream image,ā he said. āThis is, in part, what the film is confronting.ā
