Actress Isabella Rossellini and director Guy Maddin relax at the film festival yesterday. (Michael Peake, Sun)

It's called My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a funny 17-minute film, dense with ideas, in which a cross-dressing Isabella Rossellini portrays legends from Fellini to Hitchcock for Winnipeg director Guy Maddin.

And given that Isabella's famous director dad Roberto Rossellini is played by a talking stomach with a booming voice (Isabella's), you could be forgiven for assuming that that idea came from Maddin, creator of freakishly-intense oddities like The Saddest Song In The World and Careful.

But you'd be wrong.

"It's all Isabella, and she knew exactly what that stomach should sound like for some reason," quipped Maddin, sitting in with his movie-star pal and honorary-Winnipegger and making her giggle through our interview.

"I like her mixture of morbid frankness and girlish playfulness. It's why we get along. It's not yin and yang. It's yin and yin somehow. She has, as I do, an ongoing dialogue and relationship with all the important dead people." (Isabella cracks up again, her laugh like music).

"But the idea of me playing the characters was Guy's," she says. "I thought of actor friends helping me, but (she turns to Maddin) it was you. You were so helpful and I thought 'Yeah, that's why I need Guy Maddin.'"

Enough you two, get a room ... Oh yeah, I forgot, we were already in one at the Sutton Place.

Rossellini and Maddin last worked the Festival together on his The Saddest Music In The World (in which she played a rich amputee who walked around on leg-shaped beer steins). Yesterday, they hosted a retrospective for the 100-year anniversary of the elder Rossellini's birth (he died in 1977). My Dad Is 100 Years Old was the opener for a screening of Roberto's leftist neo-realist masterpiece Rome, Open City (shot on-scene as Nazis retreated from the city).

Between narrative bits (and shot in Maddin's trademark crackling '30-style black-and-white), My Dad consists of angry debate between Roberto, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Gone With The Wind director David O. Selznick, with a cameo by Charlie Chaplin and a scene in which Isabella talks to her mom Ingrid Bergman (in the role Isabella was born to play).

"The debates are not based on reality. None of them ever met, or if they did I was not even born," Rossellini says. "The film is not about them, it's about my assumptions. I've read about them, their interviews, their books. It's correct to say Selznick would say films are illustrated narrative. I assume Hitchcock would say 'It's emotions.' And Fellini would say dreams."

Cineastes have a tendency to typecast Roberto Rossellini as the "founder" of neo-realism, a step in the progression that led to Vittorio De Sica and Fellini. His daughter sadly concurs. "Roberto was a step, and he's generally dismissed as a step. Nobody looks at his work now, we're more interested in who stepped over him.

"A lot of curators want to do a full retrospective, but the problem with my father's films is it's hard to find copies. The one we're showing, frankly, is not the best. My dad's films had a history of financial difficulty and companies that distributed them might have gone bankrupt. And anyone like my dad who did not work for the establishment is even more endangered."

"I don't know if the Toronto Film Festival would have shown Open City if we didn't have the pretext of a new film or me coming or something. So the intention of the film is to stimulate debate and remember Rossellini."

Co-produced by the Documentary Channel, My Dad Is 100 Years Old airs on the channel on Sept. 30.