Ceremony

New York premiere of Sas Carey’s exploration of the secret spiritual life of the shamans of northern Mongolia.

A Q&A with the filmmaker will follow the screening.

Ticket includes a special tour of the shamanic masks and costumes in the exhibition Becoming Another: The Power of Masks at 6:15 PM.

It took some years until [the shamans] let me see a ceremony, and then a little bit more until they let me shoot the ceremony.” A project ten years in the making, Ceremony is a documentary which reveals the secret spiritual life among shamans in northern Mongolia, specifically focusing on one particular ceremony that few outsiders have ever witnessed, let alone filmed. Sas Carey, a nurse from Vermont, spent over a decade with the shamans and nomads in the steppes of Mongolia working with Nomadicare, a group which provides medical care to the people of the steppes. After many years, the group allowed Sas to film their shamanic ceremony where a shaman slips into a trance and takes on a spirit. The shaman and others give commentaries on the events during the documentary to help viewers comprehend this mysterious phenomenon.

“Their system is thousands and thousands of years old,” Sas says. “It’s very powerful. They just allow their souls to leave their bodies. They’re just like shells that are accepting their ancestors’ spirits, and they start acting like something else. In the movie, [a shaman named] Nergui starts howling like a wolf. It’s like the energy of the wolf is in his body.”