BIPEDALISM

A successful painter and his family move into an old country house seemingly swallowed up by the surrounding countryside. Nature delivers the only background noise in this exquisitely photographed black-and-white film. The cellar of the house contains skulls, laboratory drawings, and rolls of fi lm – remnants of a secret project conducted in the period 1930-50 to produce a cross between Homo sapiens and primates, and so arrive at a new theory of the upright gait and, potentially, a kind of superman. As the artist sifts through the materials, he discovers more and more traces of his own history, and survivors of the experiments begin to come to light… Narrated against the backdrop of a claustrophobic family situation reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman, Evgenij Jufit’s thoughtful tale also permanently reflects on the nature of the film medium.