The Longer You Bleed

About this movie

An unsettling dispatch from our dystopian present, The Longer You Bleed probes the psychological toll of constant exposure to traumatic content, here taking the form of social media images from the war in Ukraine. This engrossing exercise is the result of an intimate collaboration between filmmaker Ewan Waddell and his partner Liuba, a 20-something Ukrainian displaced to Berlin. Like many of her displaced compatriots, Liuba's Instagram feed has become a fraught space, regularly serving up horrifying footage of her ravaged homeland. As compassion fatigue sets in, she and her friends embrace absurdist humour--seemingly the default coping mechanism of our terminally online age. Waddell, in turn, borrows the tone and style of user-generated media, an apt frame for this reflexive effort to reckon with an increasingly inhuman information environment. While the stakes for Liuba and her peers are deeply personal, their growing sense of alienation is powerfully resonant.

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