Festival's Review

Dryden Goodwin's 'Unseen: The Lives of Looking', CPH:DOX Award 2015, Main competition

A visually and philosophically sophisticated, magnificent film about the relationship between vision and knowledge, from the interior of the eye to Mars, and on to drone attacks and surveillance. The film threads together the fine veins of the retina with a geologist's experiments in an endless desert, whose red dust is a substitute for Mars, and with whistleblowing, drone attacks and government surveillance of its own citizens in the British artist Dryden Goodwin's visually and philosophically sophisticated film, where even the delicate pencil drawings come from his own hand. What is their common denominator? Eyesight, and its importance for what ultimately can know about the world. An immense film, but with a refined sense of the details that give the big picture its weight and texture. Goodwin has both directed, written, produced, filmed, edited, composed and drawn his impressive and incredibly confident debut, which moves in the same visionary altitudes as auteurs such as Peter Mettler and Patrick Keiller. But which comes from a new name, who is his own master, and of whom it is safe to have high expectations. - Mads Mikkelsen