Low-Flying Aircraft

In one version of the world to come, there will be barely any children any more. Women seem ever less willing or able to become pregnant and when they do, they give birth to mutants – called zotes – that are immediately eliminated by the authorities.

Judite is now pregnant for the sixth time, although none of her earlier children lived. But this time Judite does not want to follow the state’s protocol for cases like this and so she escapes the nameless city with her husband, to hide in a run-down hotel near the sea.

Based on James G. Ballard’s eponymous 1975 short story, Low-Flying Aircraft offers an object lesson on how to do science fiction with very little means. The totalitarian soul of this society is nailed with a few shots of deserted colonnades and SWAT cops. The dilapidated world of the hotel, then, suggests hope in its fecund decay – for what wilts may become part of the soil from which something new can grow. Needless to say that in the two decades since its original release, the film’s themes have only grown more urgent.

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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