Canadian filmmaker Bruce Mcdonald is doing something unprecedented with his newest film. – He’s letting the public edit it.

Tracey Fragments, which stars Canada’s finest actress Ellen Page, is a borderline avant-garde art film with a highly stylized multi-screen aesthetic. In a recent interview on The Hour, Bruce spoke about how films fall into two categories: those that you should make and those that you shouldn’t. Tracey Fragments is definitely from the latter category. Take a look at the trailer to get a glimpse of the film’s visual insanity.

With so many perspectives and angles on the screen at once, the viewing process become much more involved. As a result of not being able to take in all the perspectives, viewers have to “edit” the film themselves by choosing which screens to watch, and when to watch them. This kind of thing happens on other “normal” films as well, but never to this extent.

But this is not Bruce’s novel idea. His idea is to let the audience literally edit the film. The project is called Tracey Re-fragmented. Through the use of a Creative Commons Licence (brainchild of the brilliant Lawrence Lessig), Bruce has made all the the footage he shot for the film available to the public and is letting them make their own cut. The score for the film, which was written by Broken Social Scene, and the dialogue script, is also available on the official website via Creative Commons. A contest will be held for the best cut. If you don’t have the energy to recut an entire film, you can submit a music video, a trailer, or a short. The winner of the contest will get a prize pack which includes Final Cut Studio 2 and they will have their movie/music video/trailer placed on The Tracey Fragments DVD.

Trent Reznor did a similar thing when he released the Garageband source files for his album With Teeth in 2005 and the subsequent Year Zero. But as far as I know, nobody has dared to try the idea with a feature film.

Bruce’s cut of the film plays in theatres on Nov. 2nd, 2007.