THE HUMAN SURGE (2016) with guest Eduardo Williams

THE HUMAN SURGE, the first feature film by Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams, translates the queasy sensations of 24-7 computing (vague, unsatisfiable desires; a sense of physical and material displacement; low-resolution, low-bars modes of social life) into thrilling, formally audacious cinema. Williams’ film flows inexorably between Mozambique, Argentina, and the Philippines, tracking the tenuous and heavily mediated threads of human connection that pass between precariously employed young people through the wormholes of the internet. Along the way, Williams’ cameras revel in the sinuous pleasures of movement, using different image textures (from 16mm to GoPro to webcams) to access dimensions of embodied experience typically flattened in the digital netherworld. Since appearing in 2016, Williams’ first feature has already become a landmark—indeed, as Dennis Lim observed in Film Comment, “no film of the 2010s came closer to the texture of contemporary lived experience than Eduardo Williams’s THE HUMAN SURGE.”

Following the film, Williams will appear for discussion and audience Q&A.

Co-presented with support from the Michael and Jane Hoffman Visiting Artist Series and the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern.

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. His first feature film THE HUMAN SURGE won the Pardo D’oro in Locarno. His works have been presented at film festivals such as Cannes, Locarno, Toronto and New York.

Image credit: A scene from Eduardo Williams's "The Human Surge." Courtesy of Grasshopper Film.

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