The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. It stars Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, David Fox and Ross McMillan.

Set in Winnipeg, Manitoba during the Great Depression, it is a comic musical about a competition announced by a beer magnate to find the saddest piece of music in the world. Musicians from across the world come to Winnipeg to try their luck in the competition, but the contest eventually boils down to a battle within one family: a patriotic Canadian father and his expatriate sons, one of whom represents the United States, the other Serbia.

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The more films you have seen, the more you may love "The Saddest Music in the World." It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntly when she poses with her sexy new beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy, absurd comedy.

To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a film can be created entirely by its style, and how its style can create a world that never existed before, and lure us, at first bemused and then astonished, into it.