‘Winnipeg or trains.”

Those were the two subjects suggested to Guy Maddin by the Canadian television station that financed his first documentary after 20 years of fiction filmmaking. Yet the resulting autobiographical film, “My Winnipeg,” which opens in the city next Friday, is anything but an ordinary travelogue. A signature melding of exuberant obsession and whiz-bang cinematic anachronism, it’s a hometown memoir of a rare sort — and in a form new even to Mr. Maddin, whose most successful film, “The Saddest Music in the World,” told the story of a legless beer baroness who promotes a contest to choose the titular song.

“I had never wanted to make a documentary,” Mr. Maddin, 52, said, speaking from his native city. “They just required too much discipline, a willingness and patience required to find your subject in the editing room.”

But Mr. Maddin couldn’t pass up a full commission from the Documentary Channel, and the director of last year’s feverish “Brand Upon the Brain!” — a faux-autobiographical film about a lighthouse doubling as an orphanage, which, in its opening weeks, included live narrators, an orchestra, a castrato, and costumed sound-effects technicians — settled on his sui generis mode of attack. “My Winnipeg” is a mythologizing pastiche of Winnipeg and family lore, full of silent-film technique and B-movie aesthetic — half dream and half history, pressed forward by Mr. Maddin’s own circling voice-over. Polish sausages float through crowded train cars, horse heads protrude from the snow-covered terrain, and actors play a mondo-ized version of his family (Dad’s body lies under the living-room rug). Mr. Maddin gave special care to the casting of the pitiless matriarch.

“Ann Savage is the only person who could play my mother,” Mr. Maddin said, speaking of the 87-year-old icon of Edgar G. Ulmer’s canonical 1945 noir, “Detour.” After reaching the storied actress via a friend in California who happened to know her, Mr. Maddin began “a two- or three-month-long telephone courtship to get her to end her 51-year retirement.”

Mr. Maddin succeeded — partly by avoiding mention of “Detour” — and found the erstwhile femme fatale actually talked the talk.

“She’s spitting rivets,” Mr. Maddin exclaimed. “I remember saying, ‘I understand, Ann, how you might be a bit uncomfortable after being away from acting for a while.’ And she says, ‘This talk about being away from pictures doesn’t cut any ice with me.’ She really tore me a new orifice when I ventured to mention that she might be scared.”

Future work with Ms. Savage now appears to be in the offing. “I signed her to a three-picture deal when I got her for ‘My Winnipeg,'” the director said. “I wanted to see a headline in Variety: ‘Ann Savage Inks Three-Pic Deal With Maddin.'”

The other star of the film, of course, is the city of Winnipeg, itself a humorously Freudian mother entity that attracts and repels in equal measure. The Manitoba capital, laid bare by a native son, roils with Mr. Maddin’s secret history and name-checking, from the travesty of the demolished Winnipeg Arena — Mr. Maddin’s father managed the Maroons hockey team — to local backstories that might have sprung from his own febrile imagination.

“One of the icons in Winnipeg is this Hermes statue on top of the legislative building — the ‘Golden Boy’ — and for years, the grounds surrounding the building were our gay cruising grounds,” Mr. Maddin said. “And he’s facing west, with an armful of wheat to show the way for settlers heading that direction. He’s emblematic of many things.”

“It’s been recently proven, without a doubt, that the building was designed along Masonic lines,” the director continued, demonstrating the storytelling verve that fuels “My Winnipeg.” “There’s a sacrificial altar in our legislative building — things like that. And it’s in one of those acoustic miracle rooms where, if you have an untrimmed nose hair whistling in one nostril or something, people can hear it clear across, hundreds of feet away.”

At times, it seems Mr. Maddin is working overtime against the traditional Canadian penchant for modesty, a tendency he views with bemusement. One episode in the film — the true story of “If Day,” a mock Nazi invasion staged during World War II to raise paranoia and funding — sent him wondering and riffing.

“They probably just said, ‘Well, it wasn’t a real German invasion, and we weren’t really that scared. … No, that was that, not much to really talk about,'” the director joked. “They’d say we don’t exaggerate, we present things life-sized, not bigger-than-life. But there’s no surer way to consign someone or something to historical oblivion than to present it life-sized.”

The director’s overflowing creative juices ensure that there are no such worries about his future projects. After years of filmmaking — spanning his attention-grabbing 1988 debut feature “Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” through collaborations with Isabella Rossellini — the Winnipegger is giving the Internet a whirl.

“I’m making a big honeycomb, or movie labyrinth, sort of a choose-your-own-adventure,” he said. “Not so interactive as a video game; you’re still getting narrative. You’ll just get to make some choices. It’s something I’m working on with the poet John Ashbery. The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, is financing it. I’m still looking for some sponsors to increase the budget.”

In the meantime, the Criterion Collection will release a DVD edition of “Brand Upon the Brain!” in August, featuring the soundtrack option of Mr. Ashbery’s live narration from a screening of the film in Manhattan last spring. (“He said he was going to channel Criswell from ‘Ed Wood,'” Mr. Maddin recalled. “And I think [the DVD has] the live narration with audience sound and everything. So if you had a sneezing fit, you’ll be on the soundtrack.”)

Last but not least, Mr. Maddin is bringing it all back home. “My Winnipeg,” after months of festival-circuit hosannas and select national openings, will play his beloved-but-inescapable burg on June 24.

“I’m going to go into the Burton Cummings Theater — named after the lead singer of the Guess Who — and I’m going to narrate it live for Winnipeg,” Mr. Maddin said. “Then I’ll book myself a one-way ticket out of town.”