The Saddest Music in the World

The Saddest Music in the World (2003) is a Canadian film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Guy Maddin and starring Isabella Rossellini. Winnipeg, 1933. Legless beer baroness Lady Port-Huntly posts a $25,000 prize for whoever can play the world's saddest music. Competitors from across the globe arrive with their instruments — and their grievances.

Maddin shot the film to look like a damaged artifact: heavy grain, expressionist staging, the awkward cadences of early sound cinema applied to something that knows exactly what it's doing. The result sits at an intersection rarely visited — absurdist comedy, bitter melodrama, and national-identity satire — all at once. Rossellini on glass legs filled with beer is one of the more arresting images in Canadian cinema of the 2000s. Stream The Saddest Music in the World (2003) online on iFILM.