Remainder, based on Tom McCarthy’s novel, is a psycho-thriller, the first fictional feature film by Israeli video artist Omer Fast. The story begins with a dramatic event: Tom, the protagonist, played by British actor Tom Sturridge, is hit in the head by an unidentified object. The after-effects of this trauma scar not only his body and damage his mental state. After waking from a coma into a different reality, of which he has no memory, Tom clings to a series of dark memories, and is determined to reconstruct every detail of his past. Thanks to money offered by the insurance company in exchange for never revealing what happened, his frantic search for memories becomes an obsession. He builds cardboard models of buildings that resurface in his memory, switches to meticulous full-scale reconstructions, inhabited by actors hired to play characters, and withdraws into a cocoon of alternate reality conscientiously manufactured. The film unfolds in an endless loop in which the central event of the story is repeated over and over again. Omer Fast explores not only reality and non-reality issues, but gives rise to a reflection on the ephemeral nature of the human mind. The memory of origins, desire and trauma are elements that flow into each other, interrupting conventional narrative.

 

Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972 and grew up in Israel and New York. He currently lives and works in Berlin. His solo shows were exposed at the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna (2007), at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2008), the Dallas Museum of Art (2012) at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2014). He appeared at the Venice Biennale (2011) and dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012) and among the honors he has received are the Bucksbaum Award for The Casting at the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 2008 and the National Gallery in Berlin awarded him the Young Art prize in 2009 for his film Nostalgia. His works are present in many international collections, including Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.