The Human Surge () is a 2016 experimental film directed, written, shot and edited by the Argentine director Eduardo Williams. It was Williams' debut feature film, after having made a number of short features. The Human Surge is divided into three separate narrative and geographical segments: the first in Buenos Aires, the second in Maputo, and the third in Bohol.
Each segment follows a handful of characters, who are often seen loitering or drifting between spaces, such as workplace and home. The segments are linked with diegetic bridges involving digital communication. Williams has stated that he wanted to explore the sensation and feelings related to aimlessness and travel, and thereby "create a rhythm between excitement and boredom or surprise and depression." The characters depicted in the three segments are invariably poor, restless and on the search for connection with other human beings.
The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2016, where it won the Golden Leopard - Filmmakers of the Present. It was subsequently released at film festivals in Toronto and New York to critical acclaim. Critical comparisons were made with other filmmakers working in the slow cinema subgenre, which emphasises the durational aspect of the moving image, rather than its narrative qualities.
Synopsis
In Buenos Aires, the 25-year-old Exe is seen waking up and getting dressed in his apartment. He wades waist-deep through a flooded neighbourhood to arrive at his workplace, a supermarket, only to be fired from his position. He subsequently spends time with his friends and family, loitering with the former in urban spaces and visiting online sex chat rooms. They perform sex acts, like fellatio, on each other in front of a web camera for virtual payment.
The movie moves on to the next segment through the window of a Chaturbate website, in which a group of African teenagers in Maputo, Mozambique are also seen engaging in cybersex for money. The Mozambique characters are also unemployed and empoverished, and perambulate through the streets between odd jobs and social events.
One character is found urinating on an anthill, which functions as a diegetic segue to the film's third segment, when the camera follows ants moving into the earth, before finally arriving at a hand holding a smartphone in a jungle somewhere in the Philippines. The film subsequently follows a couple of characters bathing together and walking through the jungle, in particular one woman looking to charge her cellphone. Finally, the film moves into a technological factory in Bohol, where tablet computers are made on an assembly line. The last words are spoken by a machine, repeatedly saying "Okay."
Production
Williams had made six short films before his feature debut The Human Surge, in which he had experimented with different video formats and textures. In the short films Pude ver un Puma (eng. Could See a Puma, 2011) and Tôi quên rôi! (eng. I forgot!, 2014), he and his usual cinematographers Joaquin Neira and Julien Guillery experimented with various aesthetic strategies—notably the use of long, handheld tracking shots (often described as "floating" and "restless"), amateur photography, as well as elliptical storytelling—which they also used in The Human Surge.
For The Human Surge, Williams used three different video formats, one for each segment: the Argentine segment was shot on 16 mm film, the Mozambique part with a Blackmagic pocket camera—subsequently recaptured in Super 16 from a computer monitor, and the final Philippine sequence on a digital RED camera. In the Mozambique segment, Williams operated the camera himself, considering it "so small," whereas in the two other segments he was helped by several assistants.
Williams had regularly employed a domestic Argentine setting in his first short films. However, in the latest shorts—That I'm Falling? (2013) and I forgot! (2014)—he opted for different locales, Sierra Leone and Vietnam, respectively. Having rarely traveled abroad as a young man, Williams was struck by the beauty of foreign languages, and wanted to use them in a filmic context. He eventually also discovering a charm in his own vernacular, spoken Spanish.
Analysis
The film has been analysed for its commonalities with other entries in Williams' oeuvre, most notably the themes of alienation in the internet age, and how modern technology creates distance between people.