TAJINE STUDIO

If there is one person Matthew Lancit can’t get out of his mind, it is his uncle Harvey. Dark rings around his eyes, pale, blind, his legs amputated. Like Harvey, the filmmaker also suffers from diabetes. He has the disease under control, but one question is always nagging at him: How much longer? His long-term (self-)observation reliably revolves around fears of infirmity and mutilation. He translates the feared body horror into film, stages himself as a zombie, vampire, a desolate figure. Lancit playfully anticipates his potential decline, serving up a whole arsenal of effects which – as video recordings prove – go back to his youth. It is not for nothing that the “dead” in the title is also reminiscent of “dad.” Because “Play Dead!” also negotiates his own role as a father.

Zou tells the story of a man with a missing leg who moves forward more intensely than an able-bodied man. The amputated leg, a phantom limb that he can still move in his mind, is the pivotal point of this story. At the same time a trace of the war that made him lose most of his family members and forced him to flee his country, at the same time a brake on his exodus that made walking painful and more laborious than any of his fellow travelers, it is also the fulcrum for his integration into a new territory.