Step into a candlelit room where dancers move like ghosts caught in an endless scroll: A Yard of Lunatics isn’t just a fashion film—it’s a manifesto wrapped in movement, AI spectres, and centuries-old satire. Directed by Rei Nadal in collaboration with Thomas Alsop of Deathmask, this haunting work reanimates Francisco de Goya’s 1794 painting and Los Caprichos series, dragging their dark mirrors into our hyper-connected moment. We begin with a visceral spark. Three dancers, Sonya Mohova, Yos Clark, and Ethan Jacobs, aren’t models; they’re prophets, staging our cultural exhaustion in motion. Their choreography is a pulse, a plea against media overload, each stretch and fall a wordless scream into the digital abyss. In the flicker of candlelight, their faces twist into Goyaish masks, shadows of our collective unease.
In one scene, AI-generated “Goya-esque” spectres emerge—blotchy, unnatural, uncanny. They feel familiar yet monstrous, as if Goya’s brush were run through machine logic. Nadal layers these AI figures carefully, "the ultimate aberration; deviant and lacking in originality," as she admits, yet in that deviance lies a reflection: our tools mirror us back distorted, reminding us that even technology can’t rewrite the dark corners of humanity.
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This film gestures at politics but not with slogans. It dissolves ideological binaries into image and sound, letting each viewer wrestle with what they bring to the screen. Nadal refuses to indoctrinate; instead, she invites a personal reckoning. “Truth is eternal, the problem with people involved in politics is that they manipulate truth,” she says, pushing us to question how our senses, our feeds, our very attention is commandeered. The story behind the screen is also radical. Deathmask, the anarchic art project founded by Thomas Alsop, refuses typical fashion tropes. Alsop blends industrial leather, chainmail, merch that’s part T-shirt, part art relic. It’s anti-seasonal, anti-catalog: a guerrilla aesthetic that echoes Goya’s irreverence. Here, clothes are armor against narrative, against consumption, against forgetfulness.
Imagine a world where every scroll is a brushstroke. News headlines swarm. Feeds flicker with outrages. Our attention fractures. A Yard of Lunatics holds up a warped mirror: we look, but do we see? With stylized dread, the film asks: What do we become when media saturates us? Are we performers? Spectators? Haunted masks?
By marrying ancient satire and AI, candlelight and choreography, Nadal and Alsop unfurl a layered meditation not about what politics is, but about what it feels like in a fractured, image-flooded age. The title itself, a “yard of lunatics,” may evoke disarray, margin, and the hysterical. But within that chaos, there’s clarity: the film refuses neat answers, trading them for atmosphere, for tension, for a mirror held to our scrolling faces. The ending doesn’t resolve. Shadows outlast the dancers; spectres linger. The screen dims, but the questions stay lit. Who are we when even our deepest fears become pixels? When truth flickers behind filters? A Yard of Lunatics doesn’t comfort; it unsettles, awakens, provokes. In the best tradition of satire, it doesn’t point fingers; it makes you look. This isn’t a fashion film. It’s a requiem for the distracted, a dark lullaby for our attention-deprived era. And in that flickering haze, something profound pulses: awareness.
