Lem 2021: Stanisław Lem on Film
Streaming
  • June 4, 2021 through July 1, 2021

A voyage into an enigmatic universe of otherness … The results are rich and strange, interweaving schlubby humour with astronomical awe.”

Anton Bitel, Sight & Sound

Shot mostly in Ottawa, this head-spinning, divisive sci-fi drama by Hungarian arthouse experimenter György Pálfi (Hukkle, Taxidermia) adapts, loosely, one of Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s most esteemed works, the philosophical novel His Master’s Voice (Głos Pana—“The Voice of the Lord”—in the original Polish). When Péter (Csaba Polgár), a Hungarian journalist, glimpses his missing-for-decades father in a documentary about a mysterious incident in Colorado that has long obsessed conspiracy theorists, he travels to America to investigate, and becomes embroiled in strange events involving secret government programs, Cold War politics, and, perhaps, extraterrestrial contact. The film’s dizzying array of multimedia formats and disorienting shifts in mood and tone are director Pálfi’s analogues for the complexity and range of Lem’s deeply ruminative original. The cast of this crazed oddity includes more than a few Canadians, including Corner Gass Eric Peterson. In English and Hungarian with English subtitles.

To stream this film:
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The film is available to stream through July 1.
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This film is available to stream in Canada only. 

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An utterly unique and hyper-modern adaptation … Pálfi is one of today’s Hungarian filmmakers worth following.”

Martin Kudlac, MUBI Notebook
Polish Cultural Institute NY
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