Acropolis is proud to welcome Argentine director Eduardo Williams for a special rerun of The Human Surge 3 (2023), recipient of this year's Best Experimental Film prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, as well as the local debut of his 2022 installation A Very Long GIF.
About the program:
The Human Surge 3 (Dir. Eduardo Williams, 2023, 121 min)
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.
A Very Long GIF (Dir. Eduardo Williams, 2022, 75 min)
Recorded with a swallowed pill camera, the video A Very Long GIF is an observational journey through the landscape of the digestive system, combined with a detailed zoom into cities and people moving in the limits of our vision, filmed with a powerful telephoto lens. These disparate image spaces sustain each other with the tension of celestial bodies. The sound of overlapping movements through different human agglomerations offers a third level of observation. Scales are flipped and imperceptible movements are unveiled in the longest GIF you’ve ever seen.
Note: A Very Long GIF will be projected in the gallery at 2220 Arts + Archives before and after the screening of The Human Surge 3, at 6:45pm and 10:00pm. The Human Surge 3 will begin at 8:00pm.
In person: Eduardo Williams
"A dazzling coup de cinema." —Lawrence Garcia, Reverse Shot
"A film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso 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
"Proudly immune to narrative conventions, The Human Surge 3 doesn’t just ape an aesthetic that’s become so prominent in our screen-mediated lives, but wonders what can be built upon it." —Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage
"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)