Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HUMAN HIBERNATION, Under a Cow's Eye

Like many Canadians (and others who live in a colder climate), I often dream - at least fleetingly - about hibernating for the winter, like our bear brethren. Sleeping away those colder months, and reawakening with the earth as it begins its spring cycle. What would human culture and society be like? How would our stories and daily lives change?

Filmmaker and artist Anna Cornudella Castro imagines just such a world in The Human Hibernation. An experiment that became an art installation that became a film, it's part slow cinema, part faux documentary, following a small group of these humans and understanding what would change in the rhythms of life.

In this world where humans sleep in the three months of winter, a boy awakes prematurely. Crawling out of the earthen cave, he finds himself alone in the wintry landscape. He wanders far enough away that he can't find his way back, and must make his own path, at times crying for his family, at others mesmerized by the world around him. When the spring awakening does happen, his sister discovers he is missing, and she must try to retrace his steps.

We have moments of this world as the boy explores it - in the last days of winter, when the snow and the animals reign. There is a human dwelling, but it has (obviously) been neglected. Chickens and goats roam freely inside, there is a layer of dust, vines spill across the floor, and there is a sense of abandonment. In this world, with humans being gone for even just a few months, it means they have less control over nature. And so, they must obey its rhythms.

Much of this happens under the scrutinous eyes of animals, especially cows. This feels a strongly deliberate choice: cows are an animal that has been bred and used into complete domesticity. Cornudella Castro lets the animals, now, watch the humans with the same intensity and mild disdain that we often watch them, as if these humans, since we must hibernate, are on equal footing as any other animals.

Cornudella Castro takes time with these awakening humans. We watch as they clear the leaves and vines just enough to allow access to shelter; we listen as they tell stories of their found families, as it seems families are found in hibernation, rather than necessarily related by blood. There seems, then a kind of trust that grows naturally, as it must - humans must trust each other, must be gentle and kind, to ensure protection and safety in the loneliness of winter and the abundance of spring.

The Human Hibernation asks questions of how we exist as humans, in a way not that is loud or angry or disruptive, but if we found a pattern that fits more the rhythm of the earth, if we found a way to sleep through those dark times and emerge once the light is safe, and the world is safe for us, and from us.