Last and First Men
A message from the future breaks through the veil of time. A gentle and kind voice speaks of what awaits humanity in many millions of years: evolutionary changes and an inevitable catastrophe. The prophetic words are accompanied by apocalyptic visions. We see successive monuments with fantastic shapes that rise in the vast wasteland, apparently abandoned by their builders. The posthumous directorial debut of the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson is an avant-garde science fiction spectacle, reminiscent of Chris Marker’s classic, La Jetée. This ambitious work is a weave of contradictions: it is at the same time hyperactive and ascetic, contains evocative images, but also depends on viewers' imaginations. Its overtones also seem to be paradoxical as gloomy fatalism goes hand in hand with an ardent affirmation of everything that fate brings.
Jóhann Jóhannsson
Jóhann Jóhannsson was born in 1969 in Reykjavík and passed away in 2018 in Berlin. He was a musician, best known for film soundtracks who often worked with Denis Villeneuve, for whom he composed the original motion picture soundtracks to Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival. Jóhann received Oscar nominations for the soundtracks to Sicario and The Theory of Everything, and won a Golden Globe for the latter. His directorial oeuvre includes two films, The Last and First People and the short documentary End of Summer, released a few years prior.