(HONORABLE MENTION)
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Original Film Title: Twisted Mind
Director’s Name: Nathan Benisty
Writer’s Name: Nathan Benisty
Producer: Libelo productions, Valentine Wurtz, Mélisse label
Country of Origin: France
Country of Filming: France
Language: English
Runtime: 4 minutes 56 seconds
Film Description:
A clinical white room, plunged into darkness. In the half-light, a male figure on a granite table. A large one-way glass panel fills one wall.
In the adjacent room, behind the glass, a woman turns a potentiometer on the control panel. In the room, the light comes on and the character gradually opens his eyes. With a robotic gesture, he stands up and sits on the edge of the table. His perfect features and the precision of his gestures suggest he is not really human.
The woman is typing on a touch screen and enters a computer code: “start_programlearning”. She teaches the humanoid robot how to look like a human, by teaching it highly complex gestures using digital sources and a video server. These are very old ballet sequences, in black and white. Dancers, always solo, perform some of the best-known and most difficult steps from the repertoire.
From the control unit, the one-way glass provides a view of the main auditorium. On the auditorium side, the glass looks like a projection screen.
The robot reproduces precisely every movement caught on the screen, much to the satisfaction of its creator. But a new sequence – a pas de deux between a man and a woman, depicting a love scene – seems to have a peculiar effect.
Frozen, the robot stares at the screen with an intense and palpable emotion. Perhaps the robot is also aware of its loneliness and inability to experience this kind of humanity. A tear rolls down its cheek.
Faced with this sign of humanity and the potential of her creature, the woman is frightened and reluctantly enters the line of code “erase_all_memory” on the keyboard.
At the same moment, in another room of the laboratory, in a total darkness, Edouard Ferlet plays on his PIANOÏD2 device with two pianos, one of which is mechanical.