Come to your senses
2020 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Alicia Eisen, Sophie Jarvis
Genres: comedy, documentary, experimental
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
Nine artists across the continent record their sensory experiences of lockdown, assembling an absurdist collage that turns the video-conference format upside down.
Picked by Felix
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Nine artists weaponizing Zoom's deadest format into something genuinely unhinged—this is what happens when you refuse the polite documentary about lockdown and instead let absurdism eat the medium itself. The fact that this works at all, that it's *funny* in the ruins of the video conference, is exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes everyone else groan until they can't stop watching.
The collage methodology here sits in careful conversation with experimental documentary lineage—from Brakhage's sensory manifestos to contemporary essayistic fragments—yet the execution feels measured and composed rather than chaotic, each artist's contribution weighted with formal intention. It's a film aware of its own formal traditions while interrogating them through constraint.
The decision to let each artist's sensory documentation exist in its own visual grammar before the Zoom grid unifies and fragments them is what makes this work—it's a single structural choice that transforms what could've been gimmicky into something that genuinely captures nine different interior worlds colliding.