‘Leviathan - Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel’

The screening on the 12th of June will be preceded by an introduction by director Véréna Paravel and will be followed by a Q&A. 

Filmed on board a fishing trawler off the coast of Boston, where Herman Melville’s whale ship gave chase to Moby-Dick, Leviathan pushes back the boundaries of the filmable. Shot with an array of miniature cameras fixed to fishing nets or thrown overboard, the viewer finds himself plunged into a panic-stricken, disorientating and all-encompassing experience. A radical and innovative film, a milestone in contemporary cinema that became a reference point in the field of anthropological filmmaking.

Véréna Paravel is a filmmaker, visual anthropologist, and artist. From 2006 to 2023, she collaborated with Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Together, they made Leviathan, Somniloquies, Caniba, and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Venice 2023, Special Jury Prize), creating bold, non-anthropocentric cinema. Their work has been shown at major festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, etc.), and in institutions such as MoMA, the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, the Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern.