Spite Your Face

Rachel Maclean’s captivating baroque reworking of Pinocchio that exposes modern greed through phallic mockery, plus Gabriel Abrantes’ playful artificial intelligence comedy.

Credits

Dir-Scr Rachel Maclean
UK
2017
38min

Simultaneously sumptuous and gorgeous, garish and grim, this is a re-working of Pinocchio for the neo-liberal era. Rachel Maclean’s dark fairytale, that represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, depicts a brash and baroque binary world of poverty and riches where the prospect of easy wealth tempts even good boys like Pic into bad ways. But if everyone believes the lie, what’s the problem?

Helen de Witt

Commissioner Alchemy Film Moving Image Festival, Scotland+Venice

Festival guests

These members of the filmmaking team are expected to attend the festival:

  • Rachel Maclean, Director

See the full list of visiting festival guests. Please note that we can't guarantee guest attendance at any particular screening.

Short film

The Artificial Humours

Os Humores Artificiais

Dir Gabriel Abrantes. Portugal 2017. 29min

In this post-modern fairytale at the intersection of anthropology and artificial intelligence, an Amazon girl falls in love with a robot who is also a stand-up comic. Using absurdist yet warm humour, the film explores colonialism, gender and technology.

Total running time 67min