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Guy Maddin can go ahead and keep his Winnipeg.

"My Winnipeg," Maddin's meandering personal documentary about his quirky, snowbound hometown, is as windbaggy as a municipal tourist film, but far more difficult to follow.

A free-verse, 80-minute poem set to a collage of incongruous black-and-white images, the movie dares you to jiggle to its freakish rhythms.

Maddin ("The Saddest Music in the World"), an experimental filmmaker with a heart for re-creating the look of the silent era, reinterprets his childhood through the lens of the city he loves and loathes.

Played in the film by Darcy Fehr, Maddin muses about the depressing nature of Winnipeg's architecture and laments the loss of the old hockey arena that used to house the Winnipeg Jets, the team that became the Phoenix Coyotes. He spouts off trivia about the lurid back alleys, how streets are named after brothel owners and describes how the city acquired a bridge that was meant to span the Nile.

Maddin mixes plenty of obviously made-up factoids — he claims Winnipeg residents sleepwalk at the highest rate in the world — in with whatever accurate research he's unearthed, rarely making it obvious which of his tall tales are true. To the filmmaker, it seems, there's no difference between interpretation and fact.

His actors re-enact scenes from his family life circa "1963-ish" (Maddin was born in 1956), with his domineering mother (Ann Savage) ruling her roost with mind games and coercion. Maddin's mother is a metaphor for the city that spawned him. He longs to escape her clutches yet regards her indomitable majesty with awe.

The concept buckles as the film slogs on, with the rambling narration and increasingly obtuse imagery going off on increasingly strange tangents. Maddin ruminates on a male beauty pageant run by a perverted mayor, and later imagines a supernatural young lady as the town's savior, fixing Winnipeg's problems with a wave of her hand.

"My Winnipeg" — which to its credit is like no other film I've seen — has entranced viewers, racking up rave reviews and festival awards, including best Canadian film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.

It would have been nice to have been touched and inspired by the artistic flourishes, but the film seemed to be in a language I couldn't comprehend. Maddin translated his befuddlement of Winnipeg to me, but not his fascination.