Multi-instrumentalist Heinz Riegler’s live score weaves its way through a series of abandoned and dilapidated monuments, eerily void of the humans they were built for. Paradoxically described as a “science-fiction-documentary”, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2016 film imagines, through real footage, an abandoned world, sans-human. Empty offices fall apart, cathedrals are left to flood and the skeletons of a rollercoaster are left to be licked by the shoreline until they’ll one day be entirely consumed. Separating the object from its function, the film completely redefines them.

Geyrhalter’s beautifully articulated tableaux of abandoned spaces are like catnip for the urban explorer within. Already poignant upon the film’s release, Homo Sapiens is made even more affecting within a post-pandemic context, rendering the experience uncanny and uncomfortably close to reality.

This special screening includes a live electronic soundscape by ARIA Award-winning sound artist Heinz Riegler.