Toronto, 1899. At the dawn of a new century, ambitious young politician Mackenzie King (Beirne) dreams of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada. At the top of his class at the Dominion School of Nationhood, King’s prospects are good and his clairvoyant Mother (Negin) has already chosen his future wife, the Governor-General’s militant daughter, Lady Ruby Elliott (St-Laurent). But when King loses his bid for both leadership and the hand of Ruby to the heroic Bert Harper (Ahooja), his world is thrown into a chaos of maudlin outbursts and compulsive masturbation. Based upon the neurosis and confusions recorded in Mackenzie King’s diary, Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century walks an ambiguous line between historical biopic and speculative fiction. Filmed in studio on 16mm in with animated sequences, it is at once an epic melodrama, a fulminating satire and a hallucinogenic fugue-state.
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