This exclusive luxury cruise presents itself as the perfect holiday and family utopia. However, all artificial facades of this attractive consumer product dissolve, as a psychedelic dream world unfolds, illusions break and the crude reality beyond superficial comfort is unveiled.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: The Sunset Special 2 is, par excellence, a grand act of trolling elevated to the level of art. But beyond the way the film adeptly juggles with a repertoire of glitch art and deep-fried memes — both in terms of wry, post-post-postmodern humor and its extensive, deliberate use of digital errors (.jpeg artifacts, rudimentary copy+pastes, primitive robotic voices, etc.) —, Nicolas Gebbe’s film is a sharp satire of the typical, petit-bourgeois aspirations of a nuclear family living under tehno-feudal capitalism, taking its caricaturesque portrayals of traditional gender to new, dizzying heights of vacuous cringe. (Flavia Dima)
Nicolas Gebbe was born in London. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main as a 3D artist, filmmaker, and sound designer. In 2018 he received his art diploma at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach with a film major. He focuses on experimental 3D animation and hybrid film formats. His animated short films have been screened at a variety of festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinèma Montreal and Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2022 his hybrid project The Sunset Special won the Hessischer Filmpreis, and his VR short Lockdown Dreamscape VR won the VR storytelling award at LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt International.