This documentary explores the human body through depictions of surgeries and autopsies in multiple hospitals around Paris, including intimate close-up footage from inside human bodies.
Five centuries ago, anatomist André Vésale opened up the human body to science for the first time in history. Today, De Humani Corporis Fabrica opens the human body to the cinema. It reveals that human flesh is an extraordinary landscape that exists only through the gaze and attention of others. As places of care, suffering and hope, hospitals are laboratories that connect every body in the world.
"De Humani Corporis Fabrica becomes not just tense and flabbergasting but also deeply moving; it gets at the idea of a kind of spiritual and corporeal transference, the knowledge that healing other people’s bodies invariably exacts a toll on one’s own." - LA Times
"De humani corporis fabrica is easily one of the best documentaries of the year. But before you scramble to be first in line for opening day, please be warned that it is chock full of intense close-ups of actual surgery, including on the most sensitive parts of the human body, such as the eyeball. It’s truly squirm-inducing but, hey, maybe that’s your thing. In that sense, it’s also gotta be high in the running for most metal movie of the year too." - Battleship Pretension
"This is captivating and gross, and certainly a must-see for would-be medical students or anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of the surgical world." - Nashville Scene