Caniba

On June 13^th, 1981, a Japanese exchange student was arrested outside Paris carrying a suitcase filled with the remains of a Dutch fellow student he had killed and eaten three days earlier. After having been declared mentally ill and legally unanswerable, he was sent home to Japan, where he was released in 1986 due to pecularities of the Japanese legal system.

Several documentaries have been made about the cannibal Issei Sagawa, but Caniba is truly singular among them. Directors Véréna Paravel og Lucien Castaing-Taylor have approached the highly disturbing subject matter with unparalleled artistic ambition. Physically as well as mentally, the film comes so close to Sagawa and his brother that it almost feels as if we are observing them through the pores of their skin. The result is a complex and quite upsetting portrait film, situated somewhere between video art and feature documentary.

Sagawa suffered a stroke some years ago, and now lives with his brother, who is also his caretaker. The filmmakers have managed to get intimate access to Sagawa, who tells openly about his heinous actions, his own wish to be eaten, the sexual drive behind his experience of cannibalism, and how he has exploited the attention he has been subject to – by creating a manga cartoon book about his own crime. By sticking to the uncompromising aesthetic of their previous works (such as Leviathan and Somniloquies), Paravel and Castaing-Taylor have made an uniquely disturbing and dark, but also exceptionally well-crafted documentary, unlike anything you have probably seen before. Caniba screened in the Horizons section at this year's film festival in Venice, where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize. Truls Foss

Warning: Due to its explicit depiction of self-injury and detailed recounting of Sagawa's crime, the film might shock the sensitivity of some viewers.

Véréna Paravel (b. 1971) from Switzerland is an artist, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (b. 1966) from the U.K. is a filmmaker. They are also both anthropologists, and work at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory of the Harvard University with exploring ethnography and visual art. Together they have directed innovative documentary films such as Leviathan (2012) and Somniloquies (2017).