Dead Slow Ahead

October 4, 2016 · The Pilot Light · 7:30 p.m.

A freighter crosses the ocean. The hypnotic rhythm of its pace reveals the continuous movement of the machinery devouring its workers: the old sailor’s gestures disappearing under the mechanical and impersonal pulse of the 21st century. Perhaps it is a boat adrift, or maybe just the last example of an endangered species with engines still running, unstoppable.

Director’s Statement

“We imagined that we were filming the last ship of mankind; a ship where the crew has not realized that the world has come to an end and continues to perform mechanical actions, subordinated to the needs of this floating steel monster which they keep feeding up to unconsciousness. Dead Slow Ahead is the portrayal of this very contemporary nightmare, with no intention however to condemn it nor to provide a sociological pamphlet.

The aim is a different one; it’s about capturing the most primitive and essential images of this universe: the forge where man becomes smaller in the face of a sentence that the exceeding and overwhelming machinery imposes on him. A machine that never rests, just like the numb head of the man who created it or the exhausted sailor who lives on it. All seem to have forgotten the meaning of creation in some foreign corner of the universe.”

“Scarcely narrative, compelled by mood, Dead Slow Ahead feels virtually inhabitable.” — Cinema Scope

About the Filmmaker

Born in Barcelona in 1976, Mauro Herce graduated in engineering and fine arts before enrolling in film school at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris.