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The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, budgeted at $3.8-million (a large budget relative to the average Canadian film) and shot over 24 days. The film was Maddin's first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, who subsequently appeared in a number of Maddin's films, and co-created a film with him about her father Roberto Rossellini. Maddin and co-writer George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest – to determine which country’s music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Guy Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920s and early 1930s cinema, with grainy black-and-white photography, slightly out-of-sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in colour, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor.
Original Release
09/17/2003
US Release
04/10/2004
Cast
Name | Character |
---|
Mark McKinney | Chester Kent |
Isabella Rossellini | Lady Helen Port-Huntley |
Maria de Medeiros | Narcissa |
David Fox | Fyodor Kent |
Ross McMIllan | Roderick Kent / Gravillo the Great |
Louis Negin | Blind Seer |
Claude Dorge | Duncan Elksworth |
Talia Pura | Mary |
Jeff Sutton | Young Chester |
Graeme Valentin | Young Roderick |
Directors
Writers
Guy Maddin, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Toles
Cast
Name | Character |
---|
Mark McKinney | Chester Kent |
Isabella Rossellini | Lady Helen Port-Huntley |
Maria de Medeiros | Narcissa |
David Fox | Fyodor Kent |
Ross McMIllan | Roderick Kent / Gravillo the Great |
Louis Negin | Blind Seer |
Claude Dorge | Duncan Elksworth |
Talia Pura | Mary |
Jeff Sutton | Young Chester |
Graeme Valentin | Young Roderick |
Maggie Nagle | Chester's Mother |
Victor Cowie | Man in Bar |
Jessica Burleson | Lady's Secretary |
Wayne Nicklas | Boardmember |
Nancy Jane Drake | American Mother |
David Gillies | American Father |
Daphne Korol | Widow |
Adriana O'Neil | Agnes |
Jeff Skinner | Reverend |
Craig Aftanas | Old Sleepwalker |
Producers
Name | Role |
---|
Atom Egoyan | Executive Producer |
Daniel Iron | Executive Producer |
Phyllis Laing | Producer |
Sheena Macdonald | Producer |
Jody Shapiro | Producer |
Barbara Willis Sweete | Producer |
Larry Weinstein | Producer |
Daniel Iron | Producer |
William Wolff | Producer |