Presented as part of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.
Different groups of friends wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards the mystery of new possibilities.
Among the major talents to emerge in international cinema in recent years, Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams returns with a breathtaking new feature: a globetrotting, playfully disorienting and utterly rewarding feat of experimental cinema. (First of all: it’s not really a sequel.) Shot entirely with a 360-degree camera, Williams follows a group of 20-something friends across three continents (Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Peru), all played by an assortment of nonprofessional actors, who drift and exist in constant motion amid the film’s expansive, contorting visuals. Taking the concept of virtual reality into otherworldly directions, The Human Surge 3 is among the few films in recent years that seems to point toward cinematic paths not yet taken, using hypnotic abstraction to make our familiar world newly spectacular.
TRT: 121 min
In person: Eduardo Williams
"It is a film in which, over two hours, [Williams] quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways." —Neil Young, Screen Daily
"Rather than functioning as a force of repressive surveillance, [the] artificial gaze [of the 360 camera] is a tool of liberation, forging as it does a borderless realm rife with thrilling potential." —Beatrice Loayza, Film Comment
"Like Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale (to which it bears more than a passing resemblance), one of those rare and anomalous visual objects that stress-tests the plasticity of one’s ontology of what might even count as a ‘film.’" —George MacBeth, e-flux
"At once disorienting and amiable, marked by jumpy sudden cuts and long-take loungers, the film evokes digitally diasporic social life, with heterogeneous friendships as wormholes, traveling from phone to phone amid a jumble of different contexts." —Mark Asch, Screen Slate
"While its globe-trotting sense of wonder shows the joys of offline existence to be as profound and vivid as they ever were, its simultaneous sense of boundless possibility and stagnant futility recalls nothing so much as the chaotic, alienating realm of cyberspace that both birthed and shaped it." —David Robb, Slant Magazine
(Available to download after screening date)