• Play Dead! with Matthew Lancit

    moderated by Hosein Jalilvand

Play Dead with Matthew Lancit

[March 06, 2024] Play Dead! (2023) is a funny, tender video diary on living with diabetes, where Lancit playfully transforms his personal experience and fear of dying into a body horror film, where an invisible disease crawls inside his body. The film premiered in the Camera Lucida sidebar of Dok Leipzig in October 2023 and is available to stream on Arte TV in France until 16 March and at Jean Rouch International Festival in May.

  • Diabetes: Matthew Lancit lives in constant fear of the complications of his disease, so he simply anticipates the body horror himself. The result is equally funny and disturbing.

  • Matthew Lancit is an award-winning Canadian documentary filmmaker currently based in Paris, France. After leaving his advertising job as a director in a New York animation studio to live in Cameroon, Lancit embarked on the making of his first feature-length documentary, Funeral Season (2011) – which has since been chosen for preservation by the Library and Archives of Canada and selected to over 50 international festivals.

    Lancit is known for his autobiographical films that intertwine his personal life with philosophical subjects. His films are marked by his simultaneously poetic gaze and self-deprecating humor, which sometimes borders on the burlesque.

  • Hosein Jalilvand is an Iranian film director-scholar based in Geneva. His films play with the intersections of history and cinema. After completing his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, Hosein began pursuing his long interests in cinema with a Master’s in Film Studies at the University of Tehran and a Master of Arts in Documentary Film Directing from DocNomads. His short documentary “Song of the Bell” (DocLisboa, 2018) won the best director award in the Green Years competition section. Since then, he has been researching a series of texts about colonialism and its manifestation in wildlife movies while developing a feature documentary on the topic.