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NB: Les Vampires runs 6 hours and 23 minutes in total and is composed of 10 episodes ranging in length from approximately 15 minutes to 1 hour.

A sensation during Toronto's Nuit Blanche festival in 2007, Louis Feuillade's celebrated serial makes a rare return, giving audiences another opportunity to venture deep inside the underbelly of early twentieth-century Paris, into the mysterious, sinister and marvelous world of Les Vampires. Made and released with breakneck speed during WWI, the ten-episode film chronicles an anarchic gang of cunning criminals who terrorize the city of lights' narrow, cobblestone streets, soot-dusted rooftops, and grands appartements. Led by cross-dressing temptress Irma Vep, whose cryptic name is an anagram for "vampire," the anti-bourgeois clan practices the arts of abduction, secret messages, hypnotic trance, outlandish and sexy disguise, and euphoric dance in the infamous cabarets of Montmartre (where vampy Musidora, the Surrealists' beloved femme fatale, who plays Irma Vep, was discovered). Their gutsy jewel heists set off an investigation by an obsessive journalist who attempts to foil their semi-improvised rondo of robberies. Anticipating Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Rivette, David Lynch, graphic novels and James Bond, Feuillade's epic, pulpy serial was a favourite of the European avant-garde thanks to the larger-than-life head of the Cinémathèque française, Henri Langlois, who salvaged the film from a garbage can behind the Gaumont studios. An acknowledged influence on the collage work of Max Ernst, and a film which Alain Resnais has called "one of my gods," Les Vampires is essential viewing.

Presented with live piano accompaniment by William O'Meara.

Special ticket prices apply.