Along with nabbing a “Filmmakers of the Present” award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Eduardo Williams‘ The Human Surge has earned a berth of positive reviews there and at subsequent festival showings — along with plenty of bafflement. The sorts of conversations, debates, and head-scratches it’s sparked will surely continue with Grasshopper handling the picture’s U.S. run, which begins in only a few weeks.
There’s a trailer ahead of the occasion, and it gives off a relaxed vibe that, thanks to a compelling beat hovering over this gorgeous action, turns casually surreal. That seems true to the picture at large, about which we said, “To put it upfront, Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge is pretty much a film that, by nature, is unlovable. Often blatantly ugly or boring, it’s not so much deliberately confrontational in the way so many experimental films are (or pride themselves on being), but rather risk-taking for the sake of something almost impossible to articulate — even if based in something obvious.”
Watch the preview:
Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town.
The Human Surge will begin its theatrical run at Metrograph on March 3, and expand from there.