Issues With my Other Half
2023 · 6m · Austria
Directed by Anna Vasof
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
In 23 short scenes, artist Anna Vasof splits, reverses and extends the human body -- and its relationship with phones and masks -- through seamless digital effects.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Vasof's doing the fractured-body-as-metaphor thing that feels like it should be pretentious, but the phone-and-mask obsession actually lands—she's weaponizing digital seamlessness against itself, which is genuinely perverse in a way that matters.
The 23-scene structure recalls structural avant-garde cinema while the execution sits firmly in contemporary digital surrealism; Vasof's command of formal constraint—each split and reversal precisely calibrated—positions this alongside the body-manipulation lineage of Pipilotti Rist and early digital-era experimentalism.
The decision to make the digital effects *seamless* rather than glitchy is what sells it—that frictionless morphing between fragmented bodies becomes more unsettling than any VFX artifice could, and it's the kind of restraint choice that transforms a 6-minute runtime into something that lands like a feature.