Private Project

Bodyhackers

A story about people who reinvent their ideals of perfection to incorporate a sensual attraction to surgically transformed bodies.

  • Carlos Conceição
    Director
    Tommy Guns (2022), Name Above Title (2020), Serpentarius (2019), Bad Bunny (short, 2017)
  • Carlos Conceição
    Writer
    Tommy Guns (2022), Name Above Title (2020), Serpentarius (2019), Bad Bunny (short, 2017)
  • Carlos Conceição
    Producer
    Tommy Guns (2022), Name Above Title (2020), Serpentarius (2019), Bad Bunny (short, 2017)
  • McCaul Lombardi
    Key Cast
    "Denver Blake"
    Sollers Point, American Honey, The Inspection, Deadland, We The Coyotes
  • Elina Löwensohn
    Key Cast
    "Dr. Pollard"
    Simple Men, Schindler's List, Nadja, Amateur, Sombre, Basquiat, Fay Grimm, The Wild Boys, She Is Conann.
  • Alba Baptista
    Key Cast
    "Stephanie"
    Warrior Nun, Mrs Harris Goes To Paris, Amelia's Children, Mother Mary
  • Joana Ribeiro
    Key Cast
    "Renée"
    The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, The Black Book, Nightride, Das Boot, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Veil.
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Genres:
    Drama, Sci-Fi, Body Horror
  • Completion Date:
    April 18, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    250,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Portugal
  • Country of Filming:
    Portugal
  • Language:
    English
  • Aspect Ratio:
    21:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Carlos Conceição

Carlos Conceição is a Portuguese-Angolan filmmaker. He specialized in English Literature of the Romanticism and authored monographs about Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe, J. G. Ballard and J. M. Coetzee. He then enrolled at the Lisbon Film School, where he graduated in film-making in 2006. In the early years of his career, Carlos created video art, installations and music videos for bands such as Pop Dell'Arte. His first short fiction film "The Flesh" (2010) put him on the map as a talent to watch out for, but it was the short films "Goodnight Cinderella" (2014) and "Bad Bunny" (2017) that established his name as an important new voice in European cinema. After his run at the Cannes Film Festival, his short films have been shown in retrospectives at various venues, including the Cinémathèque Française, the Amiens Film Festival, the Vila do Conde Short Film Festival or SiciliaQueer in Palermo. A compilation of his short fiction was released on DVD in France in 2014 and another in the US in 2023. Carlos Conceição's first feature film, "Serpentarius", premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019, presenting a more experimental and hybrid style than the short films had anticipated. The Sci-Fi film was widely praised and circulated around film festivals for several months, receiving numerous awards. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Carlos premiered a medium-length horror film, "Name Above Title" (2020), which became a surprise hit at genre festivals and a favorite among horror fans, winning the prestigious silver Méliès in Strasbourg, competing in Sitges for the gold Méliès and taking the award for best film at the Seville Film Festival. 2022 saw the release of Carlos Conceição's second feature film, "Tommy Guns", at the Locarno Film Festival, where it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film. It is distributed in the US by Kino Lorber.

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Director Statement

This film scrutinizes the world’s worship of advertised bodies. It’s a parody of body horror and its protagonists are ambivalent about technology and its consequences. They discover a disturbing fascination with the language and theology of plastic surgery, blending cosmetics and Menippean satire to mount a scathing critique of scientific authority and expose it as an elaborate form of magic that neither consoles nor contains their fear of mortality. They meditate on the relationship between waste and weapons. They seek catharsis in violence and solace from the sedative effects of media, where the fascist tyranny of beauty issues from the insinuation of filmed images into every crevice of our lives. If advertising is a ubiquitous voice droning at the edges of consciousness, the omnipresence of cameras turns all behavior into acting, disabling characters from discriminating between real people and images. This film analyzes the relationship between magic and dread, the myriad theologies through which youth seeks to reclaim sacredness and transcendence in a secularized world of fearsome technology and fulsome messages. Cosmetic surgery becomes a source of transcendence that enables a more satisfactory relationship with nature, the body and death. Mostly, the possibility to feel. These characters become obsessed with finding accommodation between themselves and their bodies. It turns into an erotic and existential quest, a deliberate dependency, a type of happy slavery.