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In 1981, young Issei Sagawa of Japan murdered a Dutch student in Paris and ate part of his body. Declared mentally ill, he did not face a normal trial, and after spending two years in a French clinic, he returned to Japan. There he wrote a book, published a manga about his crime and even appeared in pornography. In an attempt to unravel the dark motives that led him to cannibalism, the anthropologists and film-makers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor perform in 'Caniba', their third full-length film, an atypical and sensory portrait of Sagawa, who more than thirty-five years after the events in Paris, lives suffering a paralysis that keeps him partially immobilized.
Almost hallucinatory images of unidentified sleeping figures float across the screen to the accompaniment of increasingly unnerving monologues, the "dream narratives" of Dion McGregor, an aspiring Broadway lyricist who may have been performing for his roommate actively recording these sessions. In somniloquies, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor discover a dark, forked path to the unconscious in the ranting, sleep-talking voice of an obsessive and possibly deranged individual whose racist, misogynistic and xenophobic fears are unleashed with propulsive force and screeching climaxes.
A documentary shot in the North Atlantic and focused on the commercial fishing industry.
Focuses on five hospitals in northern Paris neighborhoods. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others.
A two-channel installation utilizing both digital video and 16mm film, Commensal focuses on the controversial figure of Issei Sagawa, who gained notoriety in 1981 when, as a graduate student in Paris, he murdered a fellow student and engaged in acts of cannibalism. After his release from a mental institution, Sagawa returned to Japan, and later appeared in innumerable documentaries and sexploitation films. In contrast to earlier journalistic documentaries on Sagawa, the film suspends moral judgment and explores a realm that eludes classification as either “documentary” or “pure fiction,” to instead chart the ambiguous territory between crime, fantasy, and social realities, between an individual and the economy of his public persona.
A portrayal of a hidden enclave of auto shops and junkyards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City's development scheme.
An apocalyptic vision of the vertiginous intermingling of the sea and the sky.
“Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. Shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, the audio composition combines excerpts from Japanese genbaku film soundtracks, audio recordings from scientific seismic laboratories, and location sound.”—Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Submarine spirits of monsters and demons, soldiers and sailors, pirates andwarriors, slaves and serpents, skulls and skeletons.
An archaeology of both the ocean and the image, this piece reworks the sequences of Leviathan that were shot in and from the sea. Projected at 1/50 of the speed at which they were recorded, it simultaneously slows movement and animates the still, revealing a liminal universe at the threshold of human vision. In this flux, one beholds a netherworld of aqueous forms that appear in one frame and disappear or transmogrify into something else in the next.