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The best film from this years Cannes Festival. A film that opens up and dives into the human body. An overwhelming experience and exploration of the capacity of modern surgery, five hundred years after the body was opened up for the first time for science.
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Nominated for Directing
Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Original Title: De Humani Corporis Fabrica Directors: Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor Country: France Year: 2022 Duration: 115 min Producers: Pauline Gygax, Max Karli & Valentina Novati

SPECIAL SCREENING: 14th of October (6 PM). Introduction before the screening by one of the most premier surgeons in Norway.

SPECIAL SCREENING: 16th of October (5:30 PM). Jonas Kinge Bergland + guest, in dialogue about surgery with Verena Paravel and Lucien Casting-Taylor (France) after the film.

The latest film by the groundbreaking filmmakers behind Leviathan and Caniba is not only an unprecedented cinematic immersion into the human body, it also reveals how disturbingly intense life of doctors and the entire unity of a hospital building can be, as a machine to keep us alive. De Humani Corporis Fabrica — named for Andreas Vesalius’s key Renaissance text on human anatomy — is the latest film by Sensory Ethnography Lab duo Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Shot at several hospitals in and around Paris with a specially designed camera that permitted the filmmakers to record footage inside the body, through the guts and bowels, but also through the hallways and corridors of the sometimes dystopic hospitals, the film probes through body, soul and the inner lives of doctors, nurses and the life at the hospital. Almost like a real life Lars von Triers Riget. Observing overburdened surgeons and nurses at work and at rest, the film negotiates beauty and horror — as well as life and death — in a manner both cerebral and visceral (even playful and mischievous at times), confronting a reality that many of us naturally try to avoid. In a layered portrayal of the human body in relationship to the institutional body, the film emerges as a timely depiction of labour, placing frail and failing anatomy alongside the professionals who must withstand the “godlike” transgressions they perform with their hands — the cutting, severing, violently penetrating — to save lives.Gutsy in every sense as it embraces the blood coursing inside of us and reflects it through the intense flux of hospital rhythms, This film is the purest example of what Cinema can do. To immerse us into an experience.

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Few filmmakers in recent years have managed to combine formal innovation with a programmatic stance toward filmmaking quite like Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In the process of reinventing the relationship between their two fields of inquiry, anthropology and cinema, they established an experimental laboratory and school at Harvard University, the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Verena Paravel is an anthropologist, artist and filmmaker. Her work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and has been exhibited at the Tate, the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, documenta 14 and more. Her award-winning films and videos have been exhibited at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, Venice and various other film festivals.                                                                                                           

Castaing-Taylor received his B.A. at Cambridge University and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley under Paul Rabinow. Since 2002 Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

"Thinking about how modern medicine has used the tools of cinema to develop its own powers of seeing, we wanted to try to do the opposite, to borrow the tools of medicine for cinema, to allow us to see the human body in a way almost none of us ever get to see"

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