VITANUOVA

In a fable made by hyper-mechanisms of the future, a message in an algorithmic bottle relives a story of extinction from the past to a clay humanoid in the present.

With this new film, all-too-rare and challenging director Niles Atallah revisits his early career (the Luis series and Luci, 2009) and the cinema of the origins: stop motion animation, frame by frame, with the grainy feel of 16mm, and a disturbing childlike atmosphere. An enigmatic half-goddess, half-child figure, combining the smoothness of a doll and the materiality of clay, is to be our guide in this journey through times and spaces, and through our history. Mythical, prophetic, and apocalyptic times merge, troubling times in which the remnants of murderous, destructive, and deadly humankind remain. Summoning a whole universe of images and objects that bring to mind both childhood and science-fiction, Attalah composes a fable with the tools of unapologetically low-tech filmmaking: a meticulous frame-by-frame work, enriched with reclaimed archives, and with a touch of 3D software techniques. Somewhere between colorful wonder and mere terror, clay, the original material par excellence, gets animated using 21th century technology. We wander through a mobile ether, while a creaky voice delivers a raging message that seems to be carried by a cosmic wind. A new life? Vitanuova is a sensory, psychedelic, and outlandish immersion, in which the director obviously delights in experimenting all the possibilities of cinema, to take us on a synesthetic journey.
(Nicolas Feodoroff)