Grasshopper Film debuted the official trailer for De Humani Corporis Fabrica, a French documentary exploring the human body including intimate close-up footage from inside human bodies taken during surgeries and autopsies performed in hospitals around Paris. The film is named after De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, a 16th-century book series on human anatomy.

Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel (Leviathan), De Humani Corporis Fabrica, an official selection of Cannes, Toronto, IDFA, Hamptons, AFI Fest film festivals, will open in select theaters in NY and LA on April 14th, 2023.

Shot in several French hospitals over a number of years with a specially designed camera, this film by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan, Caniba) is an unprecedented cinematic immersion into the human body.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica — named for Andreas Vesalius’s key Renaissance text on human anatomy — is the latest sensation by Sensory Ethnography Lab duo Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan, Caniba). Shot at several hospitals in and around Paris with a specially designed camera that permitted the filmmakers to record footage inside the body, the film is an unprecedented cinematic immersion, sluicing through the hallways and bowels of the hospitals and probing the cavities and internal organs of the human body.

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. Throughout, the audience is reminded of the confines of our own bodies and minds and their eventual, sometimes immediate dysfunction. 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. via TIFF

Watch the official trailer for De Humani Corporis Fabrica.