Human Factors

To escape mounting tensions at the advertising agency they co-own, French-German couple Nina and Jan whisk their kids, Max and Emma, away to their seaside vacation home. The couple has signed a new politically charged client, forcing them to confront their clashing priorities. But what’s meant to be an idyllic off-season retreat turns sinister when burglars tear through the house, unseen by anyone except Nina. Though at first the aftermath brings the family closer, it’s short-lived once Max reveals he glimpsed his father hiding during the break-in. As the police investigate and the evidence doesn’t add up, the account of what took place begins to unravel alongside the couple’s faith in each other.

Advancements in information technology have left a messy physiological residue. The body swiftly responds even to subtle shifts in everyday tools and regular environments. The fixation of virtual space as indiscriminate to absolute space reinforces corporeality as the site where internal and external languages collide. Ilona Sagar’s exhibition Human Factors analyses international physical measurement standards and the science of responsive design through short film, digital imagery, performance, text and audio. Ergonomic syntax, both scientific and fleshy, fuels the film’s idiosyncratic logic and Sagar’s vivid output.

A world-weary, widowed police inspector has to break his vow of self-isolation and get back on the field after his teen daughter is arrested for the possession of a gun tied to a much-publicized murder.

A TV drama.

In 1914, an engineer sent away to reorganize a factory exchanges letters with his wife. As he tells her about his experiments in taylorism, she picks up bits and pieces of this method and applies it to her daily tasks at home. While he gets disappointed by the Taylor system, she becomes a true domestic engineer. Mingling images of American institutional movies to extracts of handbooks on management from the 1900s and 1910s The Human Factor aims at showing the genesis of Taylorism and its main effects upon industrial societies. It is also a love story.

Feeling unfair about the power's portrayal of all its opponents, at the dawn of the '68 protests a young man decided to become a photographer to set things right. "Taking a good picture is a great act of faith". Tano D'Amico thus began a journey that would lead him to be at the forefront of the social battles of the 1970s: the birth of new movements, "the appearance on the threshold of history of a people who had never entered history", the hopes, illusions and betrayals. Tano still continues to photograph workers, the homeless, migrants, the last people and all those who take protest to the streets.

The film is based on some metaphors written by Hans Viksten and recited by Max von Sydow, supplemented by speakerless image sequences that appeal to the viewer's own imagination and emotions.