New Release: The Sound of Insects DVD

The Sound ofInsects movie sceneKino Lorber released the stylized 2008 Swiss documentary The Sound of Insects on DVD on July 19, 2011.

The winner of the European Film Academy Documentary 2009 award “for its skillful exploration of minimalistic means to create an extraordinary visual story between life and death,” The Sound of Insects will carry a list price of $29.95.

The movie looks at the story of when, in a remote wintry forest, a hunter discovers the mummified corpse of a 40-year-old man. A diary is found near the body, detailing the man’s everyday thoughts as he commits suicide through self-imposed starvation.

Based on a true story and adapted from the novella Until I am a Mummy by Shimada Masahiko, Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects is an investigation into the mystery of the man’s enigmatic self-destructive motivations. Taking on his point-of-view, the film presents the notebook entries as stream-of-consciousness musings on the world around him as his body dissipates, an attempt to piece together the causes of his disillusionment.

With its luminous cinematography of the hallucinated memories of the cities and people the man left behind, the film is ultimately a meditation on how the renunciation of life paradoxically reveals its beauty.

No bonus features are on the DVD.

Check out the trailer here:

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.