SNAPSHOT
In a dystopian future where fossil fuels were exhausted, ruling corporations had turned to desperate measures to generate energy. Books were banned & confiscated as fuel for the fire, and with them free thinking had been lost. Human beings had morphed into illiterate cockroaches.In New York City an underground group of exiled scientists, writers and artists were the last bastion of those who remembered the books. The group risked their lives to seek the books, and save them from being destroyed. They are known as The Inksect. This is the story of how one of their own, Pikes, on a book quest is led to an even more important discovery: paper, pen & literacy. (synopsis via Laughing Squid)
Anyone who has ever picked up a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, will appreciate the liberating power of knowledge and learning or simply surrendering yourself to a reality-busting flight of imagination.
You become, without exception, a richer person for having imbibed of the worlds within books, whether ereal or imagined.
The key word there is “person” since The Inksect, directed by Pablo Calvillo and the team at MaliArts in Mexico City, brilliantly imagines a future in which that very literate humanity has been taken from us by a governing body who sees books simply as fuel and not the drivers of emotional growth and humanitarian learning.
This beguiling short film, which draws from a delightfully idiosycratic film noir aesthetic, shows how powerful it can be, abnd restorative in truly remarkable ways, to come across knowledge, truth and literacy when it has been comprehensively denied to you.
The 9 minutes of The Inksect are winningly trippy, dreamy and off the chart surreal at times, carrying with them a simple truth – we surrender the very things that make us human at our peril.