Guy Maddin’s latest experiment, ‘The Forbidden room’ is an astonishing tribute to the history of cinema executed with tremendous craft and originality. The multidisciplinary Canadian artist and his co-director and regular collaborator, Evan Johnson, who is responsible for the film’s awe-inspiring colour and visual effects, began conceiving it in parallel with their art project Seances, both shot publicly in two museums, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and Montreal’s Phi Centre.
‘Seances’ original idea involved the shooting of 100 short movies, remakes of lost films, but while being made, it shifted towards more original material, altogether to become an interactive internet project in which the audience will be able to combine those films at random, generating an unlimited number of permutations connected in surreal; dream-like and unexpected ways.