Looners

Directed by Jenkin van Zyl

Looners (2019) is a kaleidoscopic fantasy filmed in the immense ruins of Hollywood film sets in the Atlas Mountains. Leading us across a series of fantastical worlds performers, anonymised by silicone masks, enact scenes of ritualised pleasure and violence in a manner simultaneously ludicrous and grotesque. This unruly species, somewhere between human and monster, are compelled towards abject repetitions by obscure libidinal drives, ‘a kind of love-as-violence, and violence-as-love’, repeatedly hazing their captive latex inflatables. Rejecting all binary classification–––of real and virtual, front and back stage, male and female, self and other, rationality and madness, surface and subtext, style and content, time and space––– the film instead embraces multiple selves, instability and deviance. Commissioned by Hayward gallery for ‘Kiss my Genders’ (2019)