Similarly, some of the truth is omitted. When Maddin screened an excerpt of the film for tiff programmers, he did nothing to correct their admiration for the performance of Maddin’s own mother as his mother. My Winnipeg, My Mother: why not? In fact, the actress playing his mother is 1940s B-movie hottie Ann Savage, who made dozens of films but owes her cult status to the 1945 noir Detour. This, too, is vintage Maddin. He casts an octogenarian B-movie femme fatale to play his own mother in that documentary staple, the dramatization. But Maddin’s scheming is manifold. Savage’s presence is at once self-referential and self-annihilating, drawing us into the director’s life while pushing us away.

A week after the Toronto premiere, on the morning of September 15, in a wing chair in the lower level of the Fairmont Royal York hotel, Maddin sat in a black suit with a few pieces of luggage at his feet. He had just arrived from Kansas City, an American corollary of Winnipeg.

“I guess you won,” I said. Upstairs, in a few hours, tiff would announce the prizewinners of its thirty-second festival. There was no other reason for him to be in Toronto, let alone the hotel. I was there only because I had seen an early film and had nothing else to do but await the announcements.

Maddin might as well have been sleepwalking. He had been awake since 3 a.m., and the flight — he was giving a seminar at the university — had been marred by a screaming baby. In a nearby café, coffee was served to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation. Shapiro walked in, as did other well-wishers, other filmmakers. His daughter arrived in the full bloom of late-term pregnancy. He was to be a grandfather.

The group grew in numbers and excitement as we made our way up in the elevator. Roger Frappier, the Montreal-based producer of such films as Denys Arcand’s Le Déclin de L’Empire Américain and Jean-François Pouliot’s La Grande Séduction, who headed the Canadian jury, was standing nearby. I asked him about the decision. He would only speak for himself: “I asked myself which is the film I would most like to see in ten years.”

After the prize, tiff’s Piers Handling came up to Maddin. The two have a curious relationship. Handling is still trying to live down his decision nearly twenty years ago to pass on Maddin’s first film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital. Hardly an effusive person, Handling slapped Maddin on the shoulder and shook his hand. He said Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic for Variety, had closed his Toronto wrap piece with an astonishing observation: “I’ve been coming to the Toronto film festival for more than twenty years, and I can safely say that this is the first time I’ve been able to make the following statement: the two best new films I saw here this year were by Canadian directors. The men responsible for this unusual state of affairs were David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin.” There was a moment of silence. Then somebody took a photograph. Later that night, Maddin was back in Kansas, back on the American prairie. Anonymous again, but with $30,000 in his pocket.

As for Winnipeg, after years of head scratching and dissociation, it has finally if not wholeheartedly embraced Maddin. Now, like old mad Emperor Norton, the derelict who “ruled” nineteenth-century San Francisco, Guy Maddin attends the symphony for free. Like Degas, he gets to watch the ballet from the wings.

After the Winter Garden performance, Maddin remained onstage to take questions from the audience. Someone asked him if he intended to take the live-narration show on the road. “Absolutely not,” he replied. “After I read every line, I said to myself: ‘I’ll never have to say that again.’”