“Rei Hotoda mounted the enormous live production of my silent film BRAND UPON THE BRAIN in front of 1600 skeptical Winnipeggers in my hometown, conducting the players with all the verve, precision and melodramatic oomph the show so desperately needed! Rei delivered and then some! She brought down the house! Thanks to Rei, that was the most exciting night of my life! Wow!”

Rei Hotoda conducted the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Guy Maddin’s extraordinary film – Brand upon the Brain with narration by Isabella Rossellini.

“In the weird and wonderful supercinematic world of Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin, personal memory collides with movie lore for a radical sensory overload. This eerie excursion into the Gothic recesses of Maddin’s mad, imaginary childhood is a silent, black-and-white comic science-fiction nightmare set in a lighthouse on grim Black Notch Island, where fictional protagonist Guy Maddin was raised by an ironfisted, puritanical mother. Originally mounted as a theatrical event (accompanied by live orchestra, Foley artists, and assorted narrators), Brand upon the Brain! is an irreverent, delirious trip into the mind of one of current cinema’s true eccentrics.” —The Criterion Collection

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