The film examines an unprecedented moment in performance art history, as acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramović provokes a group of 21st century gallery visitors to part ways with their personal belongings, strip away their digital avatars and connect with the others around them.
The gallery became a time-out from everything that consumes us in our day-to-day existence. A place to stop, find silence and challenge ourselves. A space in which both audiences and artist can confront who they are and why.
REVIEWS
“Adina Istrate and Giannina La Salvia documented not just the show itself but also the creative process and not least what it meant to some of its many participants. Everyone had highly different and often deeply personal experiences, which for many became the beginning of a healing process. After one year of social distancing, ‘512 Hours’ feels even more generous in its radical vision for new and free communities. We experience a unique artistic talent in action in a film that ranks among the finest takes on creative thinking and practice.” - CPH:DOX
“… a documentary that has the great merit of photographing with grace and clarity that process as complex as it is fascinating, difficult to understand if not experienced, which is the artistic catharsis in which, in apparent contradiction, flow, life and movement are fully perceived only in immobility and dispossession, in a process that almost transcends the human, to arrive at the divine .” - Birdmen Magazine
“While the hook for the film is the artist Marina Abramovic, the brand-new winner of the Princess of Asturias Prize for Arts 2021, the work holds an unexpected and fascinating gem: it shows the reaction of the audience to one of Abramovic’s original performances.” - Cineuropa
ACCOLADES
Festival Participation: CPH:DOX 2021 - World Premiere; Espoo Ciné International Film Festival, Biografilm Festival, Mostra de València – Cinema del Mediterrani Festival, Bucharest International Dance Film Festival, Festival de Cine por Mujeres, Cambridge Film Festival
IFP Completion Documentary Lab (2018)
US In Progress Co-Production Market /American Film Festival, Paris (2018)
In order to remember, you first need to forget.
Through pharmaceutical experimentation, Dr. Louis W has developed an opiate that can put an end to the rising suicide rates plaguing a desolate yet fast-approaching future. TERMINALLY HAPPY begins in the middle of Louis’s final experimentation – on himself.
Starring ALASTAIR MACKENZIE (Black Mirror), EMMA CAMPBELL-JONES (Doctor Who) and WILLIAM STAGG (Macbeth).
REVIEWS
“A transfixing and unsettling experience” - ★★★★ Starburst Magazine
"A cerebral sci-fi experiment…reminiscent of Black Mirror” - ★★★★★ Vulture Hound
"A premise which could rival some of the most thought-provoking episodes of Black Mirror" - ★★★★ HeyUGuys
"Terminally Happy has the viewer on edge long before the sci-fi twist. Those eager to see more of Istrate's deft hand at sci-fi should look forward to her upcoming debut feature EVE, a psychological thriller about the first manned mission to Mars.” - Short of the Week on One Room With A View
