Spiritismes
Director: Guy Maddin
Writer(s): Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Producer(s): Phyllis Laing
U.S. Distributor: Rights Available
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Amira Casar, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, Elina Löwensohn, Mathieu Demy, Jean-François Stévenin, André Wilms, Grégory Gadebois, Jacques Nolot
High set of profile actors join one crazy project which is best described by the avant-gardist himself – “Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it.”
Gist: Every day, Guy Maddin invites visitors of the Centre Pompidou to witness the making of a new film inspired by a long-lost movie. Summoning these wandering spirits of cinema in theatrical “séances”, Maddin and his actors inhabit their ghostly scenarios. Example: Maddin and his cohorts would “contact” the ghost of a lost film – William Wellman’s Ladies of the Mob, for example, or Mikio Naruse’s The Strength of a Moustache – and then recreate/reimagine it as if under the influence of the cosmic ectoplasm.”
Release Date: We’re not sure if this can be packaged as one 5-6 hour ode to lost films, (there are 100 short films in all) but I could see the Toronto Int. Film Festival attempting to package this for consumption.
"Ron and I wanted to make a film that looked at what it means to be an outsider and we wanted to explore what it takes to reach out to someone whose life is very removed from your own."
