Department of Communication and Media Studies Organizes Screening of El Auge del Humano 3
John Cabot University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies organized a screening of El Auge del Humano 3 (The Human Surge 3)by Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams on March 6, 2024. The screening kicked off the department’s Spring 2024 edition of the Digital Delights and Disturbances (DDD) lecture series, which has been dubbed “Decolonize! Digital Delights & Disturbances,” and features a journey through technology with a decolonial and anticolonial gaze, weaving through the intricate narratives of race, gender, and our planet’s wellbeing.
The year’s series is in collaboration with NERO magazine. In addition, all the DDD events from now on will be organized in collaboration with CRITT (Centro Tecnoculture Transnazionali), a new interuniversity center that has been launched in collaboration with The University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence.
The Human Surge 3 explores the younger generation’s climate anxieties through an overstimulating technique fit for the digital age. An experimental and decolonial odyssey that bends the world with a 360-degree camera, the film slips between Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Peru, blurring the countries into one gloomy jungle where murmurs of Tamil, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish overlap, melting with eerie ambient sounds.
“This is a film that can be read in many ways. The film is about encounters, about confusion and possibilities, but also about sharing time together, about characters who are not happy with the system and their jobs, and don’t find any other solution but to come together despite the geographic separation or the language barrier, and take off together to fantasy—meant as a possible way of imagining different realities. This is also a film where we start to discover that looking around and connecting with other humans might be a good way to imagine other possibilities,” explained Williams.
Williams used a 360-degree camera because it allowed him to decide the framing of the film during the postproduction process. “This is a very important aspect because it completely changes the moment in which we think the framing of the film. I chose this camera because I wanted to discover what else it would allow me to do, what the possibilities and limits of this machine are,” he said.
Eduardo Williams is an Argentinian filmmaker. He first studied at Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, and then in Fresnoy, France, under the tutorship of Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. Williams works within an avant-garde/experimental tradition, and his debut feature film, El Auge del Humano, won the Golden Leopard – Filmmakers of the Present at Locarno International Film Festival (2016). El Auge del Humano 3 (2023) is his latest work. His works have been presented at film festivals such as Cannes, Locarno, Toronto, and New York.
