If fans of the director Guy Maddin, who once ended the entire world in a six-minute short film (2000’s “The Heart of the World”), happen to be wondering what he would do with a 90-minute movie, perhaps one augmented (that is, done live in the theater) by an 11-piece live orchestra, a live five-man foley team, a singer, and maybe even a celebrity narrator, then they need wonder no longer: Mr. Maddin’s new feature, “Brand Upon the Brain!,” makes its premiere today at the Village East. This is the film event of the year and it arrives dripping with something called Orphan Nectar.

Cocooned in his native Canada, Mr. Maddin has been making the oldest movies in the world since his first picture, “Tales From the Gimli Hospital” made its debut in 1988. His films are shot in grainy black and white or lurid color and layered with blankets of static, scratches, and print damage. The actors seem kidnapped from the silent era and the films’ storylines sizzle with stormy emotions, repressed desires, and a file cabinet full of feverish fetishes.

From his ode to emotional repression, “Careful” (1992), set in a papier-mâché alpine village, to the mondo ballet madness of “Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary” (2002), Mr. Maddin has spent decades creating motion pictures that look like bizarre fragments of a forgotten Finnish auteur’s long lost filmography found moldering in the forbidden wing of an abandoned hospital.

“Brand Upon the Brain!” is Mr. Maddin’s first foreign film (it was shot in Seattle) and in it he continues to mine the fertile vein of autobiography first exposed to daylight in his 2002 peep show “Cowards Bend the Knee,” which featured a young hockey player named Guy Maddin, an abortion clinic hidden beneath a beauty parlor, and a fiendish plot to graft the dead hands of a murdered man onto the stumps of the living.

“Brand Upon the Brain!” picks up the story of an older and seedier Guy Maddin, who receives an urgent letter from his mother imploring him to return to the lighthouse where he grew up and give it two coats of paint. Once there he falls into a reverie, remembering the orphanage run by his parents who secretly harvested Orphan Nectar from their charges before a team of teen detectives put a stop to their nefarious activities. A bubbling stew of Grand Guignol grotesquerie, the photoplay in “Brand” is anchored by so many sharply observed and emotional details that its wildest depravities come across as merely everyday doings for Canada, our suspiciously quiet neighbor to the north.

Entirely silent, the soundtrack of “Brand!” is provided by a live orchestra and a rotating roster of celebrity narrators reading the script. First up is the actor-director Crispin Glover on May 9; there’s Poet Laureate John Ashbery on May 13; and Isabella Rossellini (who wrote Mr. Maddin’s 2005 film, “My Dad Is 100 Years Old,” about her father, Roberto Rossellini) brings it all to a fiery finale on May 15.

As summer’s depressing brain-dead juvenilia like “Spider-Man 3” ooze into multiplexes, here — finally — is an event that’s thankfully for adults only.

“Brand Upon the Brain!” makes its premiere tonight at City Cinemas Village East (181 Second Ave., between 11th and 12th streets, 212-529-6998).