Event Details
Date & Time:
Thu February 6, 2025
7 PM-9:30 PM
Location:
The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
THE HUMAN SURGE 3 (2023) with guest Eduardo Williams
Screening and discussion with guest filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams
(Eduardo Williams, 2023, 121 min, DCP)
Seven years after his debut feature THE HUMAN SURGE (2016) conjured a new cinematic vocabulary for navigating the age of digital global culture, Eduardo Williams returned to feature filmmaking with a not-quite sequel, THE HUMAN SURGE 3, which advances on its predecessor in its formal audacity, expansive scope, and hypnotic power. Adopting the digressive, world-roaming structure of role-playing games, THE HUMAN SURGE 3 tracks a cohort of characters–casting nonprofessional actors as avatars of global queer experience–as they wander and collide in far-flung locations in Sri Lanka, Peru, and Taiwan. While much has been made of the film’s technological novelty (Williams shot the film with a 360-degree camera, later framing the sequences by wearing a VR helmet), the film also returns us to the geographical, kinetic, and technological astonishment of early cinema, the emotional landscapes of Philippe Garrel, and the otherworldly immersion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. One of the decade’s most original and essential films, THE HUMAN SURGE 3 forges, in the words of critic Beatrice Loayza, “a borderless realm rife with thrilling potential.”
Following the film, Williams will appear for discussion and audience Q&A with Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum.
Co-presented with support from the Michael and Jane Hoffman Visiting Artist Series and the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern.
About the artist:
Eduardo "Teddy" Williams (born 1987) is an Argentinean film director. 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. In 2016, his feature debut The Human Surge won the Golden Leopard in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section at Locarno Film Festival. His continued experimentation with film has earned him the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists in 2019; the 2020-2021 Fulton Fellowship at the Harvard Film Study Center; and the CHANEL NEXT PRIZE in 2022. His latest feature, The Human Surge 3, makes brilliant use of a 360-camera to create a stunningly original vision of people and places from across the globe coming together.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu