Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson

Conjuring up the spirits of long-lost films (or in some cases films that were never made), this visually dense, delirious, and interactive experience allows you to pick a short film that you, and only you, will be able to see. You won’t even know the film’s runtime until it starts. Once this unique film (with an equally unique title) starts, you won’t be able to pause it or rewind it—this is your only chance to see it. And when the film ends it will disappear forever, like the lost films that inspired the project.

The Wex hasn’t been able to show this project in our traditional spaces because Seances is not a traditional film: it’s a technical tour-de-force that lives online. Using proprietary, cloud-based editing algorithms to assemble footage, it simultaneously offers us a glimpse at future possibilities for storytelling while also drawing from narrative techniques developed in the earliest days of cinema.

Filmed on sets built at the Phi Centre in Montreal and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Seances stars a cast of internationally renowned actors including Charlotte Rampling, Udo Kier, and Mathieu Amalric, as well as Maddin regulars Louis Negin and Darcy Fehr. (various lengths, streaming video)

Experience your Seance now at the National Film Board’s website!

More about the film

• Review: “Phantoms Came to Meet: Guy Maddin’s Seances as Surrealist History of Cinema,” Senses of Cinema