SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (35MM)

Part of the SADFEST special series.

Adele Lack: Everyone is disappointing the more you know them.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director in the midst of a deep creative crisis and an even deeper life crisis, receives a grant: enough money and time to realize a monumental stage project. What follows is an attempt to recreate life itself. First his own, then the lives of those who portray it. Reality and fiction merge, houses grow in warehouses, extras play people who play actors, and the production becomes an endless loop. Cotard grows older, sicker, more lost—and his project becomes more precise, bigger, emptier. Seemingly impossible to complete.

Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is a labyrinth of memory fragments and possibilities. A film about the fear of not being enough and the deep human need to be seen. A work of total overload and absolute uniqueness.