Movielogr

Rating: 8 stars

Tags

avant garde experimental short film

All movies seen on 11/23/2025

View on: IMDb | TMDb

Seances (2016)

Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson

Experimental | Ephemeral | Short

Overview

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.

Length 13 minutes

Actors

Mathieu Amalric | Céline Bonnier | Amira Casar | Adèle Haenel | Ariane Labed | Charlotte Rampling | Kim Morgan | Vasco Bailly-Gentaud | Jacques Bonnaffé | Geraldine Chaplin | Miguel Eduardo Cueva | Slimane Dazi | Jeanne de France | Maria de Medeiros | Mathieu Demy | Grégory Gadebois | Udo Kier | Christophe Paou | André Wilms | Jean-François Stévenin | Elina Löwensohn | Victoire Du Bois | Jacques Nolot | Roy Dupuis | Caroline Dhavernas

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

One of if not the wildest, most ambitious film “project” I have seen. I’m disappointed that no one in my circles that would know about this hasn’t mentioned it already. Esp, Coffman’s group bc of their affinity for Maddin and Winnipeg.

This is a short film that is never the same short film twice. I don’t even know how they created this, these 3 directors, but it is amazing to experience. I watched this 3 times and got a different result each time, different stories and scenes. The second and third had some overlapping scenes but in an entirely different story. Had it not been so late I would’ve watched a few more to see what it mixed up. The very definition of ephemeral film.

How did I find this? I was looking at Udo Kier titles because we got the sad news that he passed away (making his Q&A discussion about his death even more poignant). I saw this title and went looking for it. 

Thankfully, this experiment lives on the NFB of Canada website: https://seances.nfb.ca/

RIP Udo Kier
October 14, 1944—November 23, 2025

Comments