Caniba

The latest documentary from filmmaking-anthropologist duo Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan, Somniloquies) has been one of the most talked about films in recent history. A deeply disturbing interview-portrait of Issei Sagawa – notoriously indicted for murder and cannibalism in Paris in 1981 – Caniba boldly heads into unforeseen territory, morphing into a Shakespearian tale of the rivalry between Sagawa and his brother, who has become his caretaker. Cannibalism here is revealed as something far more intrinsic to the human condition than most of us would suppose. This is an unnerving work of sensory whose paradoxical evocations of horror, dignity, sexual freedom and fetish, vulnerability, (im)morality and madness are not easily resolved, onscreen or off.