In this debut work, the Spanish filmmaker Mauro Herce plays the insignificant human grappling with the enormity of a colossal machine.
With exasperating slowness, the container ship Fair Lady crosses desolate oceanic expanse. Its Philipino crew seem devoid of every sense of individuality or humanity. They are very far away from those who are dear to them. They are tiny cogs inside the steel monolith that is in the process of devouring them.
The hypnotic rhythm of the engines, combined with long, wide shots, pulls us along in the feverish life aboard a ship that is driven by 21st-century neo-capitalism, without the least concern for human scale.
Dead Slow Ahead is a frenetic and hallucinatory portrait of a machinery that completely overshadows humans, rendering them insignificant: no one still knows if it is the people steering the machines or the other way around … A lonely sail inside a mechanical behemoth!
2015, 74’, 16:9, France
The Spanish filmmaker Mauro Herce is a well-known cameraman, having worked on such films as Ocaso (2010) and Arraianos (2012). He has now moved on to directing. Dead Slow Ahead is his first film.
We 15.02, 19:00: Introduction with fingerfood
Free, but reservation recommended!
