Toronto Film Festival Dailies

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THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson's Wild Phantasmagoria to Play at Toronto

NEW TRAILER HERE! http://bit.ly/1OCnaUX

TIFF PRESS DAY: Sept. 17

(w/ Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson)

Opens Theatrically on October 7

Official Selection - Sundance Film Festival 2015

Opening Night - Berlin Film Festival / Forum Section 2015

Official Selection - Toronto Int'l Film Festival 2015

Official Selection - New York Film Festival

"A tour-de-force that takes Maddin's ambition through a maze of magical melodrama. The visual effects, complementing a cocktail of nostalgia, irreverence, and sex, are as beguiling as anything in the movies today."
- David D'Arcy, Screen Comment

"Pure, knowing cinematic joy." - Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian

"An indescribably strange but somehow wonderful excursion to the outer edges of half-forgotten cinema." Kenneth Turan -The Los Angeles Times

If Canadian wunderkind Guy Maddin (MY WINNIPEG, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD) 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 and co-director Evan Johnson take 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. Created with the help of master poet John Ashberry, the film features Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adèle Haenel, Amira Casar & Elina Löwensohn as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience. 128m. Don't miss Galen Johnson's digital morphing movie posters for Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room, installed in the Atrium of TIFF Bell Lightbox. Also playing at the New York Film Festival. Opens Oct. 7 in the US from Kino Lorber. 119m.