The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“A film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.”

Neil Young, Screen International

For Sight and Sounds​’s ​“Films of the Century” snapshot, critic Erika Balsom was tasked with identifying the film of the moment—the film representative of our still-unspooling 2024. Her inspired choice: Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, a work as equally attuned to the present as to future presents imminent but not yet arrived. Expansive in every sense, this quasi-sequel (not threequel) to the Argentine’s 2016 Human Surge tracks the desultory connections between young, multiethnic wayfarers—an indiscernible confluence of real people, characters, and avatars—across three far-flung locales (Peru, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan) collapsed into a single, fluid, virtual realm. Undergirding this open-world effect is Williams’s medium-pushing stratagem: footage was captured using a 360-degree camera, then edited in VR to determine the final field of vision. The result is akin to an ethnographic tour of augmented reality, a lucid dream by way of Google Earth or a massively multiplayer online simulacra. The evolution of cinema, in other words.

In Spanish, Tamil, Mandarin, English, and Sinhala with English subtitles

The Best Undistributed Film of 2023
Film Comment

“Proudly immune to narrative conventions, The Human Surge 3 doesn’t just ape an aesthetic that’s become so prominent in our screen-mediated lives, but wonders what can be built upon it.”

Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

“[Williams] is at the bleeding edge of modern art cinema … The Human Surge 3 envisions a world where humankind hasn’t so much surrendered to technology as managed to transcend it.”

Jordan Cronk, Film Comment