TELEPATHIC LETTERS

CARTAS TELEPÁTICAS

Experimental, Feature, Other,

Portugal

2024

Runtime, min

Howard Philips Lovecraft and Fernando Pessoa were among the most influential writers of the first half of the XX century. Pessoa and Lovecraft did not know each other despite having lived at the same time, but there is a huge complementarity between their lives and works. TELEPATHIC LETTERS is a film, whose images were created exclusively through Animal Intelligence, in which a dialogue is established between his letters and essays, poems and fictions, an imaginary correspondence between the two authors, made exclusively from their texts, forming a new universe of artistic and literary possibilities, merging the Sensationism of Pessoa with the Weird Realism of Lovecraft.

Director:

Edgar Pêra

Selections and Awards:

Locarno Film Festival 77 Locarno August 8, 2024 World Premiere Switzerland

REVIEWS:

A masterpiece! Real ART in form and content. I'm in shock. Mind-blowing and a storm of emotions. Many thoughts are familiar. But how cool they are presented! How they are designed! And these ideas, suddenly, from absurdity acquire realism. A powerful effect - all barriers and mindsets in the head become shaky and vulnerable. Space appears for one's own 'delusional' ideas. Even the surrounding world is perceived somehow differently. Huge thanks!!!

Live Screenings Attendee

This is a philologist's dream. The idea of merging Lovecraft's Weird Realism and Pessoa's Sensationism is brilliant. They never met, yet their correspondence sounds frighteningly plausible. The text is the protagonist here, while the images merely create a hypnotic background.

Maria Angel

I fell asleep 15 minutes in. It’s just an audiobook with a very weird screensaver. No plot, just two guys mumbling about life and philosophy. Fine for an art gallery, but not for a cinema.

Marco Quilez

A bold feature film. Usually, these things are short, but here the authors force you to live in this glitch for an hour. It is a meditation on the death of the author and the birth of something new.

Jorge Gomez Perez

The atmosphere of madness is conveyed perfectly. The black-and-white grain and distorted figures resemble Howard's nightmares. This isn't a biopic; it's a dive into the abyss of their minds. Animal Intelligence created real monsters.

Jef Liva

Amazing! Especially that moment with the grid of Pessoa's face variations. The director shows us the latent space of the neural network, how it iterates through versions of reality. This is a new film language where the director is a prompt engineer

Ethan Wong

The film asks: can a machine feel saudade (longing)? The filmmakers call AI Animal Intelligence, hinting at something wild and instinctive. The dialogue between Pessoa and Lovecraft here is a dialogue of two lonelinesses in digital eternity.

Claudia Bigatti

I like the texture. The film looks like found footage from the 20s that's been eaten away by acid. That noise on the poster and in the shots makes the digital image feel warm and analog. Very stylish noir aesthetic.

Jennifer Wang

71 minutes of generated images? Count me out. You can see all the artifacts: melting faces, weird eyes. In the photo where they stand together, they look like zombies, not writers. It kills the humanity of their texts.

Andrew Kanivchenko