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Country: Belgium
T-Port Partner: Wallonie Bruxelles Images, Institut des Arts de Diffusion
Natan Castay was born in Brussels and still resides there as of today. In 2022, he wrote and directed the movie "Human, not human" as a graduation project for the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) located in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The idea came from his personal experience as a “turker”, a slang word used to describe people working for the crowd-working platform created by Amazon: the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Indeed, during the 2020 lockdown, Natan lost his student job in a fast-food restaurant. He then googled "how to make money online" and instantly came across the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Very quickly, this besides being a way to earn money, made him want to make a film about it. As he dug deeper into this universe, what seems to be a bottomless pit of questions arose, and the need to make a film about it was more and more prevalent. I This is, for example, the case of the site name – the Amazon Mechanical Turk – which originally refers to a legend from the 17th century , in which an Austro-Hungarian automaton called Mechanical Turk was able to play chess and beat the great historical figures of that era: from Napoleon to Benjamin Franklin or Maria-Theresa. But in reality, the mechanical entrails of the automaton hid none other than a human being. A few centuries later, Amazon decided to name its platform after this legend, perhaps cynically. Nevertheless, this chosen name holds a great meaning today. For a year, Natan met hundreds of turkers around the world and this resulted in a writing that mixes documentary, fiction and experimental in order to try and translate his own experience as well as many others.
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