Grasshopper Film has announced the North American theatrical release of The Human Surge 3 (El auge del humano 3), from acclaimed Argentine director Eduardo Williams. Nominated for Golden Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival, and a favorite at numerous films festivals including New York, Toronto, San Sebastián and Mar del Plata, among other film festivals, the exceptional and unique film will have its theatrical release starting Friday, June 28 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York Cityto be followed by Now Instant Image Hall in Los Angeles on Friday, July 12, and select theaters across the country.
The highly anticipated 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—filmed across Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan—and an intimate portrait of three groups of young people as they embark on hopeful journeys toward the mystery of new possibilities.
The reflection on a globalized society without defined characters breaks down and rebuilds cinematic language. Footage was shot initially on location with 3D cameras, before being framed by Williams on a VR headset. 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—all marginalized regions in the Global South—as they share a collective coming-of-age story. Many of them are queer and gender non-conforming, including Meera, a Sri Lankan trans woman (one of the Sri Lankan characters, Meera, is a trans woman). 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, and reaffirms himself as one of the leading and most exciting avant-garde filmmakers of his generation.
