Carcasse

Description

Extraordinary images abound of an imagined future or past: the abandoned husk of a downed airplane used as an animal shed, chickens pecking feed from an old construction helmet, a raft with a roof made from an old car, transporting sheep across a river. Carcasses both animal and industrial litter the landscape as people perform indecipherable tasks with scraps of industrial material in this gorgeous and mysterious black-and-white portrait of a world that may or may not be real. Is this the first science-fiction documentary?

“Carcasse is a speculative narration around the question of the adaptation of man to his environment, proposing the reconstruction of a word from its refuse. It imagines and interrogates the utopia of a return to the roots on the ruins. It describes how a community focused on the ‘real economy’ and learned to remanufacture things. The film invents their new modes of adaptation combining the Organic with Mechanics in convoking many fictional, monstrous, or absurd elements, while trying to depict a world in the most realistic way possible. The film also invents a different type of decay/regeneration cycle in the animal and plant life … As the film progresses, the viewer begins to have doubts about the authenticity of situations. They gradually come to understand the subtle dimension of science fiction of the film. With this film, we both wish to allow obsolete things to be the talismans of another present.” – Directors’ Statement

Plays with The art of flying (Jan van Ijken, Netherlands 2015, 7 min)
Filmmaker Jan van Ijken captures one of the most incredible natural phenomena on camera—the murmurations of the Common starling birds, in this mesmerizing and beautiful short.

Trailer

Film Details