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Watch The Human Surge (El auge del humano) [Audio: Spanish]
An ingeniously shape-shifting debut from director Eduardo Williams, which follows the lives of mostly young men in disparate parts of the world who are bored by (or released from) their jobs and seeking fulfillment elsewhere.
CRITICS OF "The Human Surge (El auge del humano) [Audio: Spanish]"
indieWire
This is a heckuva stimulating cinematic achievement for a relative newcomer. The Human Surge offers a shrewd commentary on the dissonance of technological connectivity and personal communication.
Williams is a gifted director who only has better films in front of him; he appears to be a guy with a concise vision making exactly what he wants to make. Which might be why The Human Surge can't quite connect: Williams only made this for himself.
Just when you think you've got the movie pegged, it pulls a daring switch of perspective. While the thrill of that little coup is short-lived, it suggests that Mr. Williams may come up with something more substantial with his next feature.
Starting in Argentina, ranging to Mozambique and the Philippines, The Human Surge picks figures from the blur of the modern world and depicts them in shadowed motion, language an indistinct gesture, too.
In Williams' film, this pulse of energy is everywhere, running through and between all of the subjects: human, animal, material, ambient, and machinic.
There is something exasperating in the way it withholds the pleasures of film from its audience, allowing long stretches to unfold with no lighting and semi-audible dialogue.
Lacking in narrative or character (the film is all theme and no story), the payoff moments for all one's carefully invested attention are few and far between.
This conundrum that can be found all over the Internet, to be sure, but rarely with such enigmatic eroticism or breathtaking technique. Like the best nonfiction work of the past few years, it encourages us to look differently at every moving image we see.