Director
Hayley Garrigus
Producer
Samuel Gursky, Kerry Mack, Michael Beuttler
Editor
Michael Beuttler
contact
Utopia
Join us after the screening on August 15 at 9:15pm EDT for a live Q&A with YOU CAN'T KILL MEME Director Hayley Garrigus and Producer Michael Beuttler, THE TRUTH ABOUT HASTINGS Director Dan Schneidkraut, and TELOS OR BUST Director Brad Abrahams and Creator Kai Wada Roath.
“How do we make sense of things when we collapse the infinite fidelity of information down into pithy sentences laid over ominous imagery?” asks filmmaker Hayley Garrigus, who, over the course of three years, from L.A. to the Nevada desert, took a deep dive into the many layers of our precarious belief system, and, more specifically, documented the genesis of Memetic Magick.
In her debut “anti-documentary”, Garrigus pushes the envelope, both stylistically and narratively, as she meets a multitude of enigmatic characters, pied pipers of the web, alt-right trolls and “lightworkers” – the new prophets of our time. Reading into memes like tarot cards, are they withering their intuition or expanding it? Repressed yet thriving in the margins, they make their way back into the mainstream, more alienated than ever. Garrigus thoroughly chronicles the “online rise of the belief that users on internet forums were harnessing chaos magick in order to elect Donald Trump in 2016.”
A new chapter to one of Fantasia’s alumni, FEELS GOOD MAN (Arthur Jones, 2020), with a more raw, underground approach, YOU CAN’T KILL MEME is a pertinent depiction of humanity as we form new, unstable myths at a dangerously rapid pace. In times of conspiracies and chaotic enlightenments, we are led to agreeing on new meanings, new measurements of reality, and baffled and confused, in this ocean of tropes, signs and symbolisms, we drown. Follow Pepe, Kek, Scumbag Steven and Insanity Wolf into a rabbit hole you will take great pleasure in falling into, riding the spiral to the end. Caution: there won’t be any ruby slippers to take you home. – Celia Pouzet
Showings
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