El auge humano, Teddy Williams, Argentina, 2016, 100’, OV with Spanish subtitles, DCP.
We met Eduardo (Teddy) Williams in 2012, during the International Film Students Meeting (San Sebastian Film Festival), where he presented his short, Pude ver un puma. Since then, we have followed his career closely; as well as that of his group of friends, students of the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires. Time has confirmed what we could already discern in those first works: that his talent and creative risk are possibly writing one of the cinemas of the future. That was also confirmed in 2016 by the Locarno Festival, which awarded The Golden Leopard for the Filmmakers Now section to Teddy’s first feature.
In that first work, Teddy presented the day-to-day pursuits of a group of young Argentineans lost in a ghostly coastal landscape. The important thing was the tone and vital concerns of those young people. That same sensation – visceral, impossible to describe with mere words – is once again present in El auge humano: the portrait of three groups of young people going about their humdrum daily activities in Argentina, Mozambique, The Philippines, as if this were a vital concise assessment of the contemporary world, as it drifts along; of its charm, of disenchanted youth. And what do all those characters and worlds have in common? Working and losing work; walking, getting to a place, saying hello; connecting or searching for connection. In a supposedly hyper-connected world, the way these characters drift along serves to gradually bring to light that which is so difficult to define, which has to do with the absence of a place, extreme sentiment, camaraderie, the animalistic, the continuity of history, the nocturnal, what shines in the darkness, in the eyes and on the screens of computers across the world. The result: a hypnotic and unique visual experience. “I think that if I make films it is, among other things, to escape from the almost absolute hegemony of words. This film departs from the need to escape from the closed world of work and survival that was presented to me as a given in my youth, in order to move towards curiosity and the discovery of other realities and fantasies.”
Eduardo Williams studied at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires (Argentina), and at Le Fresnoy, Studio National Des Arts Contemporains (France). His films have been presented at many international festivals and in retrospectives on his work. El auge humano is his first feature.
The portrait of three groups of young people going about their humdrum daily activities in Argentina, Mozambique, The Philippines, as if this were a vital concise assessment of the contemporary world, as it drifts along; of its charm, of disenchanted youth.