CHAMPAIGN – Upon commissioning Canadian director Guy Maddin to make "My Winnipeg," Lionsgate film studio Vice President Michael Burns told him to "enchant me with your treatment."

"My Winnipeg" – Maddin early on dubbed it a docu-fantasia to pre-empt debate on whether it's a documentary – ended up enchanting Roger Ebert, among others.

The critic will show the dreamlike feature, which he admits he finds hard to describe, at 1:30 p.m. Thursday during his 11th annual film festival at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign.

Maddin plans to bring with him copies of the "My Winnipeg" companion book, released just last week. Its 192 pages include photographs, the narration, dialogue, annotations, trivia and other things that did not fit into the 80-minute movie, which Ebert wrote in November has kept stirring around in his mind.

"It is reality beyond reality," the critic wrote to Maddin. "The way it mixes local legend, civic pride, stories learned in childhood, rewritten memories and yearning for the lost past may be, you think, personal to you.

"No such luck, buddy.

"That's exactly the way I think about Urbana, which, as I'm sure you know, has the Largest Rim-Supported Building in the World, the Boneyard Creek into which all the Indians threw themselves when they died, the Stadium that Red Grange Built, a house in which fairies once lived (now occupied by the woman who wrote a book about them, who I once saw in the window, and whose book I had read), and the second McDonald's in the world, when hamburgers were still 15 cents."

Ebert also wrote about seeing the Flatiron building in downtown Urbana burn down one winter night.

"...I clung to my father's hand in the snow and watched it burn, the first fire of my life, and saw for the first time tears in my father's eyes. I asked him why he was sad. He told me, 'That's where the Elks Club is. Where I spent some of the happiest days of my life.'"

Maddin, now 53, must have spent many of the happiest days of his life in Winnipeg – mainly because he's never left the city, even though he jokes at times that he wouldn't mind being run out of town.

He had hoped that would happen after he screened "My Winnipeg" for 2,000 or so of his co-denizens; instead they gave the movie and Maddin a warm reception and his 92-year-old mother in the audience a standing ovation, even though she doesn't appear in the movie. Maddin actually hired film-noir star Ann Savage, who died in late 2008, a year after the movie was released, to portray his mother. Savage had not acted in films since the '50s.

Maddin admits to having a pathologically large ratio of attachments to Winnipeg, his family and his childhood home. He returned to that home to shoot for "My Winnipeg" some fantastical scenes purportedly from his childhood, including one of his father's body under a carpet.

Maddin also re-created other events, some of which happened before he was born. Among them is one in which horses escape from a burning barn, run toward a river and are frozen in place, their heads and necks thrust above the ice. That happened in the winter of 1926-27.

"It is true," said Maddin, who read newspaper accounts of the bizarre incident. "I had to simulate the footage because Winnipeggers didn't seem to own any movie cameras until I bought one 15 years ago." He also could not find any still photographs of the equine event.

Maddin is now working on a movie he has titled "Keyhole." He described it as an autobiography of a house and a crime story inspired by Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler" (1922).

"'Keyhole' mixes film noir and fantasy elements," Maddin said. "I like that mixture. It's just an excuse for me to fetishize home once again and learn about what I did and didn't get out of 'My Winnipeg.'"

In "Keyhole," Maddin plans to shoot in an abandoned apartment building in Winnipeg that he often visited as a 14-year-old delivery boy for a drugstore.

"Sometimes I'd deliver the oddest things, like a weekend newspaper and a 2-quart 7-Up to someone whose chain on the door wouldn't permit the bottle through," he recalled. "The hall lights were always out, and there were frescoes on the walls. I'm haunted by this building in my dreams all the time. Now it's full of slaughtered pigeons, and I think there are werewolves in there."

Maddin said he will probably shoot his next film after "Keyhole" in color. "I love black and white, but I'm getting too set in my ways," he said.

Not too set regarding travel here. This will be Maddin's second trip to Ebertfest. At the 2005 festival, Ebert showed Maddin's 2000 whimsical short "Heart of the World" and his 2003 feature "The Saddest Music in the World," about a Winnepeg contest to find the saddest song.

Presiding over that competition was actress Isabella Rossellini, who plays a beer baroness who wears beer-filled, glass prosthetic legs, making for one of the most memorable images from any Ebertfest screening.

Maddin said he had a great time at Ebertfest.

"I couldn't believe how great it was. I loved going to the burger joint – Steak 'n Shake. It was so touching to see Roger retrace his undergraduate days. And the movie palace is great, and the spirit is wonderful. The on-stage conversations could not be better. I've seen those everywhere, and they're absolutely the best."