Tales from the Gimli Hospital

Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a 1988 film directed by Guy Maddin. His feature film debut, it was his second film after the short The Dead Father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in black and white on 16 mm film and stars Kyle McCulloch as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar (played by Michael Gottli) for the attention of the young nurses. Maddin had himself endured a recent period of male rivalry and noticed that he found himself "quite often forgetting the object of jealousy" and instead becoming "possessive of my rival." The film was originally titled Gimli Saga after the amateur history book produced locally by various Icelandic members of the community of Gimli (Maddin himself is Icelandic by ancestry). Maddin's aunt Lil had recently retired from hairdressing, and allowed Maddin to use her beauty salon (also Maddin's childhood home) as a makeshift film studio (Lil appears in the film briefly as a "bedside vigil sitter in one quick shot [taken] just a couple of days before she died" at the age of 85). Andre Bennett saw the film at the Montreal World Film Festival in August. He did not know who Maddin was, but paid $5,000 to buy the distribution rights for his company Cinephile. Five English language revival houses in Montreal closed and exhibitors opened a new one in a 1,000 seat theatre. The revival house asked for Tales from the Gimli Hospital to be the first film shown at the theatre. Klymkiw agreed and it opened on 30 September 1988. Klymkiw decided to show the film at the International Filmfestival Mannheim Heidelberg rather than attempt to gain an invitation to the Berlin International Film Festival as he could show the film at the Berlin forum for non competing films. Ben Barenholtz, who distributed David Lynch's Eraserhead, saw the film at the Berlin forum and organized showings at American film festivals. The film earned $116,000 in Canada and $22,380 internationally by May 1992. $105,000 was from television, $9,700 from theatrical, and $2,400 from non theatrical sources. Cinephile spent $29,000 on the film in the same period. It became a cult success and established Maddin's reputation in independent film circles.

The film received generally positive reviews, with review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reporting a 71% approval rating based on 7 reviews. Reviewers, although generally positive, also seemed perplexed by the film: Jonathan Rosenbaum commented on its "moment to moment invention and genuine weirdness" and Noel Murray of the Onion A. V. Club similarly noted that "[Maddin] self consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch." The 1989 review in The New York Times referred to its "midnight cult status" and lengthy run at New York's Quad Cinema, and noted that "Many bits of [the film's] seemingly surreal business supposedly draw on ancient Icelandic customs, like using oil squeezed from fish as a hair pomade, cleaning the face with straw, and sleeping under dirt blankets." Gerald Peary stated that it was the best Canadian film of the year. David Chute, writing in Film Comment, said the film was "exactly the kind of audacious filmmaking Canada needs if it is ever to spruce up its dour, stiff, humanistic, NFB image". The mayor of Gimli criticized the film for portraying the town's people as "some sort of barbarians".