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Whipping Zombie

Italy | 2017 | 30 min | director Yuri Ancarni | DoP Yuri Ancarni | screenplay Yuri Ancarni
A herd of goats roosts in a deserted graveyard, but the darkness hides even stranger scenes. "You can't catch zombies at night because they're asleep." So, we wait for dawn when they can be controlled. This half-hour observation of a strange ritual from Haiti winks at the Mad Masters but has little in common with Jean Rouch's ethnographic approach. The rhythmic film follows the movements of entranced dancers at the crack of the whip. The undead must be tamed. An elegantly disordered work, atypical of Ancarni's short film work, yet conceptually sound.