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Country: Belgium
T-Port Partner: Wallonie Bruxelles Images
Bio: 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.