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.
