From March 3-11, A Shape of Things to Come will be available to stream via Acropolis Cinema and Grasshopper Film. Acropolis will receive 50% of all revenue.
Sundog lives out in the Sonora Desert on the Mexican border. He is an elderly gentleman, who lives off anything that the brutal nature gives him, be it a wild boar or the psychedelic poison of a toad. A Shape of Things to Come gives precedence to the sensory materiality of the desert instead of to explanations and dialogue, and moves beyond the human scale and down to animal perspectives.
It creates a world that stretches from a distant past in the ecological movements of the 1960s to a possible future in the aftermath of the apocalypse. But the border patrol agents are threatening the peace in Sundog's desert kingdom, which the armed recluse is prepared to defend. With the desert as the ultimate existential (and cinematic) setting, the film shows the relationship between humanity and nature at a critical time, when civil disobedience is the provocative answer to the most pressing questions.
Fascinating. Sublime. Has aesthetic qualities that rival anything contemporary documentary has to offer.
- Matt Turner, The Brooklyn Rail
Continues an idiosyncratic method of inquiry, rooted in curiosity for all manner of individual and collective existence.
- Nicolás Pereda, BOMB
A Shape of Things to Come is possessed of [El mar la mar's] appreciation of the awesome power of the desert and its sublime, aesthetic potentialities.
- Carmen Gray, Modern Times Review
An intriguing film and beautiful to look at with its striking desert scenery captured by Sniadecki and Molloy who also act as their own editors and composers of the film’s haunting electronic soundscape.
- Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia
A loner in America’s Southwestern desert is the elusive subject of this mysterious documentary... Malloy and Sniadecki’s minimalist portrait evokes several themes — everything from the restorative power of nature to civilization’s destructive tendencies.
- Tim Grierson, Screen Daily
(Available to download after screening date)