Interview: Arthur Harari – The Unknown

Three features in, Arthur Harari might be one of those filmmakers whose career resists easy categorization. Beginning with Dark Inclusion (2015), he followed it with the almost unbelievable true story of Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, and now, with The Unknown (read review),  making perhaps his strangest film yet: a metaphysical body-swap mystery that begins with Parisian photographer meeting a mysterious woman named Eva at a party — and waking the next morning inside her body. Adapted from Le Cas David Zimmerman, the graphic novel by Harari’s brother Lucas, The Unknown gives Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider one of the film’s most fascinating challenges: each must inhabit not only another character, but another body, another identity and ultimately another way of looking. The film competed for the Palme d’Or in Cannes and was one of the more divisive titles of the festival, before continuing through Telluride, TIFF and NYFF with NEON handling the North American release ahead. Here is our sit down in Toronto.