An unnamed couple takes a romantic stroll among the frozen horse-heads. It’ll all make perfect sense — maybe — after you’ve seen Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.

It’s not really a documentary. It’s not exactly a memoir. It is ingenious and poetic. Frequently it’s apeshit hilarious. But, like, what the hell is this thing?

Guy Maddin’s dreamy, beguiling My Winnipeg opens with the iconoclastic filmmaker employing the most loathsome directorial tactic there is: The camera fixes on the face of his leading lady while we hear him giving her line readings. Nothing, nothing more offends an actor’s ear than when a director tells them to say the line exactly like this. No prob, though, because the actress here is Maddin’s mother. Except she’s not his mother, she’s an actress named Ann Savage. And if contradiction is a problem for you, My Winnipeg is most decidedly not your movie.

Give in to Maddin’s “docu-fantasia,” though, and you’ll find your adventurousness rewarded tenfold. Ostensibly a first-person account of the filmmaker’s last attempt to leave behind his lifelong hometown —“the heart of the heart of the continent” in his lilting, alliterative narration — it’s really Maddin’s mash note to the place, one sprinkled liberally with fun facts about the sleepy city’s history. Along with some other stuff that — I’m guessing here, folks — Maddin just made up. Indeed, to go through and fact-check some of his more outlandish claims, like that his mom used to star in a daily suicide soap-opera called Ledge Man wherein the main character almost leapt to his death five times a week for years; or that Winnipeg’s mayor used to judge the über-gay Golden Boy contest and then offer the winners cushy jobs in his office, would be a fun project, though probably exhausting and definitely contrary to the spirit of the enterprise.