North American Theatrical Release of THE HUMAN SURGE 3, Opens June 28

Grasshopper Film Presents the North American Theatrical Release of THE HUMAN SURGE 3 by Award-Winning Argentine Director Eduardo Williams

The Breathtaking Avant-Garde Vision of a Queer Utopia

Without Borders, Filmed With 360-Degree VR in Sri Lanka, Peru, and Taiwan, Opens Friday, June 28 at BAM Film

in New York City, Followed by the Now Instant Image Hall

in Los Angeles, and Other Cities

Grasshopper Film is proud to announce the North American theatrical release of The Human Surge 3 (El auge del humano 3), from acclaimed Argentine director Eduardo Williams. Nominated for Golden Leopard at Locarno International Film Festival, and a favorite at numerous films festivals including New York, Toronto, San Sebastián and Mar del Plata, among other film festivals, the exceptional and unique film will have its theatrical release starting Friday, June 28 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City to be followed by Now Instant Image Hall in Los Angeles on Friday, July 12, and select theaters across the country.

The highly anticipated sequel and "discontinued continuation" of The Human Surge (2016), winner of Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival, offers a 360-degree view of the world that is at once diasporic—filmed across Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan—and an intimate portrait of three groups of young people as they embark on hopeful journeys toward the mystery of new possibilities.

The reflection on a globalized society without defined characters breaks down and rebuilds cinematic language. Footage was shot initially on location with 3D cameras, before being framed by Williams on a VR headset. This invites the viewer into a vérité documentary/fiction experience that feels both artificial and hyper-real, showing what is happening around the fictionalized scenes and how they are surrounded by the everyday life of people passing by and observing.

In the global context of a world barreling further into an age of climate disaster, The Human Surge 3 offers a contemporary interpretation of slow cinema to explore a young generation's climate anxieties with a new, beautifully chaotic, visual vocabulary to explore the sensation of modern living. Blossoming queer relationships, intercut with a sound design of overlapping languages including Sinhala, English, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, create an illusion of what we would like the world to be and the reality of what it is.

Re-humanizing the dehumanized, the characters are all outsiders in the film's three locations—all marginalized regions in the Global South—as they share a collective coming-of-age story. Many of them are queer and gender non-conforming, including Meera, a Sri Lankan trans woman (one of the Sri Lankan characters, Meera, is a trans woman). Although the characters speak different languages, they seem to intrinsically understand each other’s dialogue, with subtitles in different colors to represent varied languages.

With The Human Surge 3, Williams rates a dreamlike landscape that is at once poetic and comforting, connecting across cultures and blending the spiritual with the technological, and reaffirms himself as one of the leading and most exciting avant-garde filmmakers of his generation.

“A film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso

quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema

in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.”

— Neil Young, Screen Daily

“Proudly immune to narrative conventions, The Human Surge 3

doesn’t just ape an aesthetic that’s become so prominent in our screen-mediated lives, but wonders what can be built upon it.

— Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

“The Human Surge 3 fully delivers on its inventions with a bona fide climax.”

—J. Kim Murphy, Variety

THE HUMAN SURGE 3. El auge del humano 3, Argentina/Portugal/Brazil/ Netherlands/ Taiwan/Hong Kong/Sri Lanka/Peru, 2023, 121 min. In Spanish, Tamil, Chinese, English and Sinhala with English subtitles. Directed by Eduardo Williams; Producers: Jerónimo Quevedo, María Victoria Marotta, Eduardo Williams, Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Ico Costa, Xie Meng, Chang Chu-ti, Aline Mazzarella, Matheus Peçanha, Naomi Pacifique, Albert Kuhn, Germen Boelens, and Raymond van der Kaaij; Cinematographer: Victoria Pereda; Sound Design: Paulo Lima. A Grasshopper Film Release.

About the Director:

Born 1987 in Buenos Aires, Eduardo Williams is an Argentine filmmaker and artist known for his work in avant-garde and experimental cinema. His works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within physical and virtual networks. After studying film at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, he joined the Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France and directed several well-received shorts. His first feature film, The Human Surge, won the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 69th Locarno Film Festival, and in 2019 he received a Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists.