Grasshopper Film will release The Human Surge 3 (El Auge del Humano 3) described as the breathtaking vision of a queer utopia without limits produced by award-winning Argentine director, Eduardo Williams. This staggeringly original voice in modern avant-garde cinema, filmed with 360-degree VR in Sri Lanka, Peru, and Taiwan promises to be a successful trilogy and opens on Friday, June 28.
Nominated for Golden Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival, and a favorite at numerous film festivals including New York, Toronto, San Sebastián, and Mar del Plata, amongst others, Human Surge 3, will have its theatrical release starting Friday, June 28 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City to be followed by now instant image hall in Los Angeles on Friday, July 12, and other selected theaters across the country.
The highly anticipated woozy, orphic sequel and “Discontinued Continuation” of The Human Surge (2016), winner of Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival, offers a 360-degree view of the world that is at once diasporic and an intimate portrait of a band of friends who finds themselves lured towards the elusive mystery of new possibilities as they try to distance themselves from their depressing jobs. As they wander through a rain-slicked, windy, late-capitalist reality they unravel the mystery of new possibilities.
The footage of this radically immersive, continent-spanning film was shot initially on location with 3D cameras, before being framed by Williams on a VR headset, giving the reflection on a globalized society without defined characters that breaks down and rebuilds cinematic language. This invites the viewer into a Vérité documentary/fiction experience that feels both artificial and hyper-real, showing what is happening around the fictionalized scenes and how they are surrounded by the everyday life of people passing by and observing.
In the global context of a world barreling further into an age of climate disaster, The Human Surge 3 offers a contemporary interpretation of slow cinema to explore a young generation’s climate anxieties with a new, beautifully chaotic, visual vocabulary to explore the sensation of modern living. Blossoming queer relationships, intercut with a sound design of overlapping languages including Sinhala, English, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, create an illusion of what we would like the world to be and the reality of what it is.
Re-humanizing the dehumanized, the characters are all outsiders in the film’s three locations as they share a collective coming-of-age story and many of them are queer and gender non-conforming, including Meera, a Sri Lankan trans woman (one of the Sri Lankan characters). Although the characters speak different languages, they seem to intrinsically understand each other’s dialogue, with subtitles in different colors to represent varied languages.
With the Human Surge 3, Williams rates a dreamlike landscape that is at once poetic and comforting, connecting across cultures and blending the spiritual with the technological, that reaffirms himself as one of the leading and most exciting Avant-Garde filmmakers of his generation.