Seances, co-created with the National Film Board of Canada, presents a wholly new way of experiencing film narrative. By dynamically generating a series of film sequences in unique configurations, potentially hundreds of thousands of new stories are conjured by code. Each will exist only in the moment—no pausing, scrubbing, or sharing—offering the audience one chance to see the generated film. This project, co-created by the ever imaginative Guy Maddin, is a visual discourse on the impact of loss within film. All the sequences pay homage to lost silent films from the early day of cinema. Seances is nostalgic but it is also frequently hilarious. Part of the joy and sadness of Seances is that many possible narratives are created but they can be only viewed once before they disappear forever.
Direction
Maddin's fever-dream silent pastiches, algorithmically resurrected.
Production
Generative code as co-director—cinema that writes itself.
Cinematography
Lost films reborn in grain, flicker, and deliberate decay.
Director
Guy Maddin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The title references spiritualism's obsession with contacting the dead—fitting for resurrecting films destroyed by fire, decay, and studio negligence.
Maddin called this 'Soviet montage by accident'—the algorithmic juxtaposition creates meaning the directors never intended, echoing how actual lost films survive only in fragments and imagination.
CA
US
