In an imagined near future, humans have lost their ability to feel, touch and smell. Deprived of physical sensations, the once human mannequins still have memories of what life was like before. As we hear their stream of consciousness through a narrated poetic text, we share the mannequins’ memories of beauty, nature and close human contact as they journey through a montage of projected images. We learn to feel what it was like to be human. The concept was conceived at the very beginning of the pandemic. With the many months of social distancing and prolonged lockdowns, the missed feelings of being human have become evermore intense.

2007. East Baghdad. A US Army Apache helicopter shoots down a group of men outside a house. It’s a Reuters photographer, his driver and the contacts of the photojournalist actually doing a report. The military who shot them from a distance, using state-of-the-art hyper-vision technology, assisted by satellites, mistook them for “insurgents” as the reporter’s camera was “seen” as an RPG. This degraded perception is illustrated here in its barbaric acme. That said, this killing is not isolated. Doesn’t virtuality gaining more and more of the reality territory? In those times of planetary virus and practically generalized lockdown, coercive power uses and abuses of its new tools for controlling the population in peacetime (drones, facial recognition, apps, etc.). The experimental film li(f/v)e interrogates through several typologies of images our relationship to reality when it has been invested by its virtual counterpart.

A mother remembers her childhood summers. Her daughter, a filmmaker, falls ill, at which point she turns towards Nature in search of images and sensations that will allow her to find peace. Here, Suyu Lee produces a sensorial and luminous personal journal about the precious things in life.