Adam Curtis | 2016 | UK | 166'

British filmmaker Adam Curtis is, in leftwing circles, one of the most admired thinkers of our time. With unique access to the BBC-archive he creates profound polemics argued with psychoanalysis, philosophy and media theory, that dissect the essence of the political and economic problems of our time.

As the final part of our Adam Curtis trilogy we’ll be showing his latest film: HyperNormalisation. In this 2016 documentary Curtis looks at how governments, financiers and technological utopians have replaced the complexity of the ‘real’ world with a much simpler ‘fake’ world. He finds the origin of this manipulation technique in the Soviet Union of the mid-seventies, when the system was slowly collapsing but it was much easier to pretend that everything was alright. Curtis describes how this technique of ‘hypernormalisation’ played an essential role in the rise of Muammar Gadaffi, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.