Release date: TBC In 2008 Israeli director Ari Folman won many accolades for his autobiographical film of his involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War: Waltz with Bashir. That movie used traditional and flash animation, real news footage, popular and classical music to create a different and original sort of "documentary" film, one that combined realistic, fact based narrative with strange and surrealist fantasies of memory, emotion and imagination. Now Folman's back with a new film, five years in the making, that also uses a mix of live action and animation to tell a story of identity that mixes reality and fiction. Here, erstwhile Princess Bride Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an unreliable actress who makes a deal never to act in another film by signing over the rights to her digital image to a film studio. The studio scans her body and continues to make films with her computer generated avatar without ever having to get Wright to do the work. Years later, she attends a showcase of the studio's futuristic technology that allows people to become animated avatars and where the studio want to sell her image for other people to become her. It all results in a gradual loss of contact with reality as Wright enters a hallucinatory state. When you note that The Congress is loosely inspired by the novel The Futurological Congress by Polish philosophical sci-fi novelist Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris, that should tell you that this is not the same kind of sci-fi as X-Men: Days of Future Past. The Congress is likely to be less action packed and more cerebral, but that doesn't mean that it won't be very visually creative, as snippets of the animation that have been released should show. Ideas of self image, digital identity, avatars and image rights are very current technological concerns and have formed the basis of a number of recent sci-fi pictures of varying quality, such as Avatar and Surrogates. The Congress looks like it could be the movie really to look at these ideas with a greater depth and with a visual style reminiscent not only of Waltz With Bashir but also the rotoscoped A Scanner Darkly, one of the most visually innovative sci-fis of recent times. Like this article? Let us know in the comments section below.
