The Grand Illusion

From visionary documentary filmmakers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, director of Harvard's esteemed Sensory Ethnography Lab, behold the human body as you've never seen it before!

Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA opens the human body to the cinema. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.

In French with English subtitles.

“Extraordinary… digs deep into the human body and opens up landscapes as otherworldly — and harrowing — as any you’re likely to see. The result is a work of purest corporeal poetry, a surgical body-horror flick to make David Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future look like an episode of ‘Bluey’ — and a remarkably unvarnished, sympathetic portrait of doctors and nurses at work.” Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“The demystification of the machine that contains the ghost makes the feats of both the surgeons and the filmmakers feel all the more transcendent.” Leila Latif, IndieWire

“One of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.” Keith Watson, Slant Magazine

CRITIC’S PICK! “Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s experimental nonfiction film… explores the many landscapes and textures of our bodies… Through these directors’ eyes, these bodies look wondrous and unsettling, macabre and beautiful, and often uncannily unfamiliar.” Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times