Not For Medical Use
2017 · 4m · Reino Unido
Directed by Camila Moreiras
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
An experimental meditation on inscription as document and as documentation, evidence and testimony, diagnosis and reaction, in which the forensic retells events through images of remains and remainders, and of questions left unanswered.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Moreiras is doing something genuinely slippery here—collapsing forensics into poetry, evidence into abstraction—but it's almost *too* self-aware about its own experimentalism, more a thesis than a provocation.
A rigorous essay film that thinks through its formal problems with real precision: how inscription functions as both archive and interpretation, how the fragment resists closure. This sits squarely in the lineage of structural documentary and conceptual art cinema, executed with uncompromising clarity.
The choice to let the image of the *remains* do all the talking—no voiceover, no explanatory logic—forces the viewer into active forensic work themselves; four minutes but it feels like an entire methodology.