Brand New-U

“There’s a better life waiting for us. Someone else. Somewhere else.” That is the motto of the company Brand New-U, which offers clients an opportunity to lead a better life by taking over the life of one of their ‘Identicals’. That sounds sunny, but twentysomething Slater discovers the darker side of this practice when his girlfriend Nadia is kidnapped during a failed life takeover. Hoping to find her again, he surrenders himself to Brand New-U’s reforms. But how can he be sure that the one he finds really will be Nadia? And how sure is he about who he really is himself?
Simon Pummell remixes elements from sci-fi films and thrillers in a story full of repeats and echoes that gradually acquires more and more dream logic. The result is an allegory which investigates the extreme consequences of the malleability of identity that characterises online life and the alienation it evokes. Film introduced by a video essay by Joost Broeren.