Sweden,
1998, 81 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
-
Johan Söderberg
- prod
-
Lars Jönsson
- cam
-
Jan Röed
- editor
-
Johan Söderberg, Lars Pauser
- source
-
Swedish film Institute, Borgvagen 1-5 S-102 52 Stockholm, Sweden. FAX 46-8-661-1820
- gga award
-
Certificate of Merit, Film & Video: Society & Culture—International
OTHER
A blipping and buzzing Baraka-like travelogue through belief, spirituality and the power of song, Lucky People Center International takes us on a mind-expanding and groove-enhancing trip. A steadily throbbing techno beat courtesy of Lucky People Center, a Swedish music group cum film team, accompanies a stream of madly eclectic images and interview footage that musically propose essential questions about human existence. And this is way beyond Philosophy 101: A man tries to sing with gibbons, looking for traces of song in human evolution—do we sing because its an essential part of our genetic makeup, he asks? Meanwhile, Marshall Applegate lectures about the future of mankind, urging the hapless victims of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide to leave their bodies behind. A shaman contorts his body into seemingly inhuman positions. A Japanese performance artist creates screaming catharsis and Annie Sprinkle talks about the orgasm. A voodoo priestess wards off evil through song and Maori dancers chant against capitalism. All of these disparate elements—cultist, religious, scientific, cultural—flow into one probing, thoughtful session of consciousness-raising. And the constant beat forms a hypnotic whirlpool that sucks you in and simultaneously shows that musicality exists in everything, even in the simple act of talking about what we do.
—Nick Tangborn
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
