Simultaneously huge in its biographical breadth and intimate in its scale, Patrick Wang’s film A. Rimbaud is a portrait of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, a grand, 175-minute biopic that eschews the genre’s convention with the adventurous spirit Rimbaud applied to the written word.

For example, while we follow Rimbaud travelling the globe, the film was shot entirely on a Winnipeg soundstage.

Also, Rimbaud (portrayed by charismatic Australian actor Blake Draper) is always alone on camera. The voices of other characters are filled in by a series of musical instruments, inevitably recalling how the same technique was employed by Bill Melendez in Peanuts cartoons, wherein adult voices were portrayed by a muted trombone.

The film ended up being shot in Winnipeg thanks largely to producer Evan Johnson, a filmmaker in his own right with shared directing credits on various films with his brother Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin, including The Green Fog (2017) and Rumours (2024).

“Patrick reached out to me in late 2023,” Johnson says. “He was simply looking for an amenable tax credit — which Manitoba has — and a production company interested in the kinds of things Patrick gets up to … someone that would understand what he was trying to do.

“I was familiar with his work and was already a big, big fan of his previous film, A Bread Factory in particular,” Johnson says, referring to Wang’s 2018 two-part comedy-drama about a community arts centre.

“We’re enablers — we want to produce films where we let auteur directors have their way with the form,” Johnson says, referring to himself and producing partner Fritzi Adleman. “That’s our whole MO.”

Wang, a second-generation Taiwanese-American raised in Sugar Land, Texas, says in an email interview his interest in Winnipeg ran deeper than tax credits.

“I was at the New Orleans Film Festival when I first saw one of Guy Maddin’s movies, Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” Wang says. “That made me a fan of both Guy and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.”

The film was shot at the Manitoba Production Centre in fall of 2024.

“A studio production tried to buy the soundstage away from us,” Wang recalls, “but having so much space was crucial to shooting a film like this. The film looks minimal, but we needed a lot of space for the optics of some of the shots, and we needed the space for manoeuvring the many sets. This is the first time I shot entirely on a soundstage, and it was a fantastic experience.”

Wang was attracted to the subject of Rimbaud in part because of his contradictions: He blazed a transgressive literary trail in his youth, only to end up a dealer of coffee and arms in Africa.

“I think the distance between the youthful poet and the merchant in Africa is something most people find irreconcilable,” Wang says. “But reading his letters, I see a similar spirit in different circumstances.

“This very extraordinary life offers us an opportunity to understand something about the trajectory of our lives. I think Rimbaud also demonstrated an incredible forward momentum in his life, an ability to move on after loss and failure. That’s a good example to have before us.”

Winnipeg provided the talent Wang needed, including musicians who would play their instruments live opposite Draper in the “dialogue” scenes.

“Having world-class musicians so game to participate in our nutty adventure was tremendous,” Wang says. “But one of my favourite things about shooting in Winnipeg is that half our crew were also directors. Our producers are also directors.

“When shooting such an unusual project, there would typically be some degree of resistance from parts of the crew, but we didn’t have any of that here. Having people so open and with such a range of abilities to contribute made this a one-of-a-kind production. It couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”

Patrick Wang will be in Winnipeg to present the Cinematheque screenings of A. Rimbaud on Friday and Saturday.

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