When Guy Maddin calls his film "My Winnipeg," he isn't kidding.

His is a singular, dreamlike version of his Canadian hometown, and it's unlike any documentary you've ever seen. He has called it a docu-fantasia, and it's a poetic blend of fact and fiction, of memory and invention, of actual people portrayed by actors (Darcy Fehr as Maddin and a character called "Ledge Man") and of a city that tugs at his heart, even as it leaves him bitterly disillusioned and looking to flee.

It's difficult to figure out what's real and what's reel, and, in the service of art, it may not matter. Maddin advances such notions that Winnipeg has 10 times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

Like a dream that takes bits of events real and fanciful and produces a bizarre, brainy blend, "My Winnipeg" features a train coursing through the "heart of the heart of the continent."

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'My Winnipeg'

3 stars = Good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Ann Savage, Darcy Fehr.
• Rating: Not rated but adult in nature.
• Web site: ifcfilms.com

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As a man in a parka slumbers on a snowy night, the narrator intones: "Winnipeg. Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg. My home for my entire life. My entire life. I must leave it. I must leave it. I must leave it now."

It rumbles into the near-past and the far-past, revisiting such events as a 1919 general strike, an amusement park called Happyland, a protest to save an elm tree and the demolition of the Winnipeg Arena, a "holy shrine" leveled for its lack of luxury boxes. It flashes questions across the screen, almost in a subliminal manner.

Especially vivid is the return to Lil's Beauty Shop, run by Maddin's mother and aunt. The stylists and customers sent clouds of hairspray, gossip and smells -- vividly described as girdles, talc, fur coats and the insides of purses -- into the attached living quarters.

Maddin was commissioned by the Documentary Channel to make a personal documentary about Winnipeg, and he told the Winnipeg Free Press that he's still not sure what the resulting 80-minute film is. Docu-fantasia or docu-rant or docu-gripe, he suggests.

Imagine if you were making "My Pittsburgh," and you revisited the home of your youth and zeroed in on tiny memories or groused about the destruction of West View Park or the Syria Mosque or Forbes Field and took other actual events and embellished them or turned them into symbols.

Don't expect a Canadian version of "Things That Aren't There Anymore." Maddin, after all, is the avant-garde director of such films as "The Saddest Music in the World," starring Isabella Rossellini as a legless beer baroness who searches for the saddest music in the world in 1933, and he takes license with the truth.

But he does it in a playful, poetic way, aided by snowy landscapes, striking images -- horses fleeing a fire, caught in an icy river and frozen in place "like 11 knights on a vast white chessboard" -- actors such as 87-year-old cult darling Ann Savage (as his mother) and conflicted family dynamics.

It's loopy and loose with the facts but weirdly lyrical.

Opens Friday at the Regent Square Theater.