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spacetime coordinates: 2019 farm in south-western France.
The Swarm (French: La Nuée) is a 2020 French fantasy-horror / drama film directed by Just Philippot. The film stars Suliane Brahim, Sofian Khammes, Marie Narbonne, Raphael Romand and Nathalie Boyer. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: London 2022
Then I fall asleep on the Tube and wake up all the way out at Heathrow Terminal 5. Feeling like lost luggage.
“The Dream City isn’t anything like real London unless you count the Square Mile – and then only in that both are full of swerves and unexpected openings. Making your way around is like playing a video game where the designers are having a laugh at your expense. There’s no map of it, no overview, and very little concession to reality. Streets can turn into canals and canals into bridges, and occasionally roads go around corners that are greater than 360 degrees with no apology. Yet somehow it all holds together.
For architectural chutzpah, the Dream City is like Singapore. Showy, extravagantly futuristic. There are neon bridges connecting the tops of buildings. There are fleets of cyclists riding point to point in transparent tubes. But when you explore on foot you find old parts underneath mossy cloisters of pitted stone with broken statues, canals that smell like ditchwater and plunge unexpectedly underground. You can ride through these dark tunnels poled by animal gondoliers who use recycled smartphones to light the way.
If you look, you can find railway-siding houses with piles of junk rotting in their back gardens just like in real London. But the back gardens in the Dream City are overshadowed by mysterious honeycomb towers whose structure looks like a cross section of bone under a high-powered microscope.”
(…) “Sometimes there are snorting horses drawing carriages over cobbles, and steaming reeks rise from manhole covers as if an underground machine is gearing itself up for a very rude belch. Sometimes the buildings are square and shiny plastic, as if they’ve drifted in from the archetypal sleeping Lego Republic.
Sometimes the city is muted to utter silence.
Sometimes the streets are metal grates over jungles that release a fume of fruit and rot and animal smells. You can’t get down there or see beyond the top of the canopy, but you can taste the moisture in the air of all that trapped life and you can hear the birds and insects in full cry.”
spacetime coordinates: Set during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, three years after the Imjin War. (the Japanese invasions of Korea 1592–1598 – three years after the famous “Battle of Unpo Wetland”)
Kingdom (Korean: 킹덤; RR: Kingdeom) is a 2019 South Korean political period horror thriller streaming television series, created and written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and Park In-je. The series is adapted from the webcomic series The Kingdom of the Gods, which was authored by Kim Eun-hee and drawn by Yang Kyung-il.
Set on a fictional, medieval-inspired Joseon, Kingdom explores the story of a Crown Prince, as he sets to investigate the source of a mysterious plague that begins to ravage his country. It stars Ju Ji-hoon, Ryu Seung-ryong, Bae Doo-na, Kim Sang-ho, Kim Sung-kyu and Kim Hye-jun. // wiki // imdb)
A special feature-length episode of the series, titled
was released on July 23, 2021 and focused on the supporting character Ashin played by Jun Ji-hyun.
The episode acts as a sidequel to the second season of Kingdom and explores the backstory of Ashin, the mysterious heir of the Northern Seongjeoyain tribe village, and the origin of the resurrection plant that triggered an unprecedented cascade of tragic events that swept through the Kingdom of Joseon. // wiki // imdb
spacetime coordinates: set in an alternate timeline in which the fall of the communist Polish People’s Republic never happened, and the Iron Curtain is still in place. / set in 2003; a coordinated terrorist attack on multiple sites took place in Poland in 1983 which altered the course of history and the Cold War did not end.
1983 was particularly appreciated by critics for its photography and atmosphere. The directors create a gloomy and cold Warsaw, where old Soviet-style apartment blocks stand side by side with futuristic and imposing government and police buildings, equipped with the most modern instruments of control. The secret services of the SB now use computer surveillance mechanisms, tracking cell phones and digitizing citizens’ data (classified according to their “level of danger”).
Society is run by the “Party”, a privileged elite who enjoy a good education and excellent economic status. The rest of the population is disinterested in politics and devote themselves to consumerism, at least as regards those goods that are not censored or prohibited. Opposing this system is the “Brigade of Light”, a group of young people who carry out resistance to the dictatorship in clandestinity.
Poland is then imagined to have seen massive immigration from Indochina, and in particular from the socialist republic of Vietnam. Some night scenes – set in overcrowded Asian neighborhoods – seem like a reference to the Blade Runner movie.
It is curious that there are very few explicit references to communism in the series (no statue of Lenin in the streets, no red star or revolutionary chant). The regime appears to have created an Orwellian state, whose sole ideological goal is the suppression of dissent and the control of individuals.
In this sense, it seems that directors are making a more general criticism of any form of totalitarianism, police regime and society-induced conformism. Agnieszka Holland herself underlines how the contents of 1983 are also current in Western countries, in contingency with the current crisis of democracy and the emergence of what the director describes as “a conservative counter-revolution”. She says in the same interview with The Guardian: “But the real questions are: maybe these people are happy? Maybe freedom is overrated?” (wiki)
1983 is a Polish crime drama streaming television series created and written by Joshua Long and based on an original idea by Long and Maciej Musiał, produced for and released by Netflix on 30 November 2018. A second season is being considered.
Blood Red Sky (also known as Transatlantic 473) is a 2021 German-British action horror film directed by Peter Thorwarth, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stefan Holtz. The film stars Peri Baumeister, Roland Møller, Chidi Ajufo and Alexander Scheer. It was released on 23 July 2021 by Netflix. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 1787. Amid the decadence of the Ancien Régime, Joseph Ignace Guillotin is responsible for investigating mysterious murders. He then discovers the existence of “blue blood”. This unknown virus spreads within the aristocracy. The virus has devastating effects: the infected nobles attack the “little people“, upsetting the established hierarchy. The revolt spreads and is the prelude to the French Revolution.
La Révolution is a 2020 French-language supernatural drama series produced by Netflix starring Doudou Masta, Julien Sarazin and Ian Turiak. In January 2021, the series was canceled after one season. (wiki)
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