Little Joe

Alice, a single mother, is a dedicated senior plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species. She has engineered a very special crimson flower, remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, this plant makes its owner happy. Against company policy, Alice takes one home as a gift for her teenage son, Joe. They christen it 'Little Joe' but as it grows, so too does Alice's suspicion that her new creations may not be as harmless as their nickname suggests.

“Happiness business has already found us” are the words of the song ending the movie that encompass the first, obvious, layer of what “Little Joe” (2019) directed by Jessica Hausner can be about. How far are we willing to biotechnologically manipulate living bodies in our pursuit of happiness, only to realise how mundane and prosaic our understanding of happiness actually is? The commodification of the most intimate relations and feelings is here dressed in pastel colours, highly controlled environments, and restrained dialogues, viscerally pierced by the sounds and crocked frames that break the seeming calmness. And through these gaps, cracks of narrative, a more complex and nuanced questions and fears arise: our, human, fear of losing control, our fear of the plant, our fear of death and fear of more than human agency. In this way, the movie invites a multilayered conceptual and sensual confrontation with human desire for mastery and more than human intimacy of its defiance. 

The movie will be introduced and discussed by Dr. Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko. She is  is a lecturer and researcher who has taught contemporary philosophy and art-science relations at the AKI Academy of Art and Design ArtEZ in the Netherlands since 2017. While at AKI, she founded a biolab kitchen space and BIOMATTERs, an artistic research programme exploring how to work with living bodies addressing ecological and ethical questions. Her research focuses on post-humanism, ecocriticism, affect theory, and new materialism at the intersection of art, ethics, and (bio)technology. 

About PhilofilmPhilofilm is a monthly series, in which, on each first Monday of the month, a film is introduced and discussed by a philosopher. The evenings are entirely in the English language. Philofilm is a collaboration between Concordia and Ideefiks, the study association for Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Twente.