Play Dead!

Every night and every morning, and before every meal, Matthew Lancit checks his blood sugar level, records it in a notebook and then injects himself with insulin. He has been afflicted with diabetes since childhood. Lancit grew up in Canada, where teenagers of his generation were marked by the “body horror” film genre. Taking cue from that, Play Dead! is culled from his diary of his family’s quotidian, filmed over five years. He stages the ‘diabetes’ as a hidden, alien presence that haunts his apartment and the very depths of his body. Using performative and burlesque codes, form and content feed off each other as the filmmaker’s body transforms gradually into a haunted shell. Laced with comedy, irony and tenderness, Play Dead! mediates the complexity of living with the disease, living with someone afflicted with it, and how relationships oscillate between caring, listening, and impatience, anger, or fear. (Rasha Salti)