Jean-Luc Nancy

The title, quoting Nietzsche describing Man as a sick animal, seems to fit Jean-Luc Nancy, famous for his thinking and especially his striking account of his experience of a heart transplant. But there is no miserabilism here, no sickness or age – instead we have a portrait of the philosopher in action in various different aspects. The first course is biographical, with family archives that take us back to the philosopher’s early years, setting the stage for childhood memories as he secretly breaks his first taboos.

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Early on in this engaging historical drama, a marquis (played by the singularly droll Jacques Nolot) offers a peddler a carriage ride on a remote country road. After sizing up his benefactor, the peddler fights motion sickness to deliver his sales pitch: “I have here a few objects of wonder, pious images, pamphlets against men of the cloth, newspapers from Amsterdam and London, holy cards, quills, writing paper…”

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Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies in a number of visual and literary passages exploring his onscreen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea. Outlandish is a journey between shores and environments, the touching of and proximity between bodies, the vanishing and appearance of crew, dimensions of form and, above all, our relations with strange foreign bodies.

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The Ister is a 3000km journey to the heart of Europe, from the mouth of the Danube river on the Black Sea, to its source in the German Black Forest. Hailed by Scott Foundas of Variety as "a philosophical feast—at which it is possible to gorge oneself yet leave feeling elated,” the film is based on the work of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 swore allegiance to the National Socialists. By joining a vast philosophical narrative with an epic voyage along Europe’s greatest waterway, The Ister invites you to unravel the extraordinary past and future of ‘the West.’

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