The authors

Purpose of Denise Gilliand Director

To get to know Denise Gilliand :

Why this topic?

I am interested in death, it is our destiny, for all of us. As far as I can remember it has been a part of my daily questioning. Exploring mediumnship allows to try to answer the question: are we going to survive our physical body?

Millions of people claim having seen, heard, experienced unexplainable phenomena. Millions of people consult mediums: in 2000 the mind reading market generated 3,2 billion € turnover in France and it is estimated that 100'000 professionals work in this field. This fascination for mediumnship may account for a research of another form of spirituality. In any case, it accounts for a collective interest for other dimensions than scientifically correct materialist thought. I am interested in these dimensions because they can, in my view, strongly encourage individual responsibility and solidarity. This is the point where this topic joins my favourite subjects.

At the beginning of your film and your book you ask the question of the evidence of after-life, what do you think of it today?

Putting the medium to the test would allow to go beyond the simple account to reach a dramaturgic stake which could keep us in suspense: will Céline be able to prove to her sceptical interlocutors (clients and scientists) life after death?

I think that mediumnship as well as life after death probably cannot be proven by nature. At least not according to the generally accepted scientific methods which require that we can reproduce the same experience and always get the same results. And yet each session of spiritual contact or healing is said to be unique and non-reproducible. The absence of proof does not prove anything either and does not justify that we discard mediumnship and label it "esoteric" because of sheer scepticism.

I think that if we work on the assumption that our life is just a small stage of our destiny, we could probably better "re-enchant" the world and give meaning to the moment, the here and now. Besides I conclude my film with this sentence.

It seems that you believe in it…

I do not believe in everything of course but I have seen a lot and I am at a point where it becomes difficult to claim that none of it exists. We say that it is "irrational", that we could never definitely prove the existence of a hereafter but could we prove the contrary? Why would it be more "reasonable" not to believe in any of it? But if we take a closer look our scepticism is challenged when we see that important university hospitals call healers to treat burns, that mediums can describe precisely how a dead person looks like or that Philippine healers operate on a patient without anesthesia. It challenges our materialist thought. We could say in scientific terms that the least improbable hypothesis is the true one, that is to say there are other dimensions to our world. We conclude the film with this quote that illustrates well our point. Albert Einstein said:

« There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. »