The mission is secret and the ambition utopian: a film to truly bring the world to an end. We Put the World to Sleep is a work about borders — a nine-year production that offers anything but certainty: performer or character, improvisation or script, death or persistence, the real or its satellite. This is the second chapter of the “spiritual trilogy” by Romanian filmmaker Adrian Țofei and his artistic partner Duru Yücel.
It’s Wednesday in a week just like any other; it’s 2 a.m. and you can’t sleep. That unanswered email is haunting your thoughts, you realize you need a distraction and you turn on the TV (or whatever the equivalent is for people younger than me) It doesn’t happen every night, but on this particular one, you catch a film that’s indescribable, like a feverish dream that you’ll have difficulty talking about it with other people. After all, that experience late at night was for you and you alone. We Put the World to Sleep brings that feeling back to me, a kind of hilarious meta-found-footage film that shakes up the genre with incredible inventiveness. We follow two actors who lose themselves in their roles; before you know it, we’re already in another layer of meta-commentary until we end up in an intense study of the psyche of serial killer Richard Ramirez. Something that deserves to be watched at unspeakable hours and with curiosity in mind. (Rui Mendes)
