Last and First Men

An experimental sci-fi fantasy set on the dying Earth two billion years in the future. The narration is based on a 1930 novel by the influential British author of science fiction Olaf Stapledon and recounts how, two billion years from now, humanity will have evolved over 18 distinct human species. There are no people in 'Last and First Men', but the film does feature three very special protagonists: the concrete testimonies of Yugoslavian brutalism, Tilda Swinton’s voice and the music of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who composed the soundtracks for Sicario and Arrival and who died in 2018 at the age of 48. Jóhannsson made several Super 8 and 16mm shorts and often used visual elements when performing his musical works. The idea for his first feature-length film came to him in 2010 when he saw Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers’ images of the colossal monuments of the Tito era.The Last and First Men is a hypnotic total work of art, a requiem for the universe containing echoes of Kubrick, Tarr and the avant-garde that turns cinema into a pure synthesis of sounds and images; a place of the impossible, where the deepest past meets the most distant future.