Perfect Lives

In her new film Perfect Lives, Agnieszka Polska reflects on a 1990 control experiment, which took place when Galileo spacecraft was passing Earth on its way to Jupiter. In the experiment, scientists wanted to determine if data sent from Galileo will confirm the existence of life on Earth. The film is constructed as a dense, hypnotic essay, where dynamically edited multiple layers of stock footage and music composed in similarity to game music create a melancholic atmosphere. The material used to create this poetic collage is a collection of hundreds of short stock videos presenting various scenes from human life and covering a number of themes, such as: business meetings, enjoying nature, group therapy, marriage, loneliness, crime. These highly artificial and unlikely situations seem to question the very existence of life: they are the evidence for the western idea of life being an illusion.