Started with Begotten in 1989, the Begotten Cycle is an amazing experimental work, a cosmic monstrosity full of devastated worlds and gutted gods, that reinvents mythology in the violence of the apocalypse. In 1989 filmmaker E. Elias Merhige directed Begotten, a sui generis saga venerated by amateurs of experimental exploitation cinema. Described by Susan Sontag as “one of the 10 most important movies of the modern times”, it leads its viewers into a surrealist and horrific world of profane and sacred rituals, as if Lovecraft’s monsters had gotten hold of a camera. In this work unlike any other, shot in inverted 16mm black and white, meticulously treated using artisanal optical printing techniques, all the material possibilities of film are embraced and ignited: grain, contrast and physical degradation. Midnight Movies’ Lost Sea Scrolls. Merhige then worked on music videos and mainstream feature films (Shadow of the Vampire, Suspect Zero), before rejoining his original planet, and returning to his original thematics and formal roots with Din of Celestial Birds (2006), a cosmic continuation of Begotten, this time combining digital and analog techniques. With Polia & Blastema (2021), Merhige completes his epic trinity. In the psychedelic tradition of 2001, A Space Odyssey and Altered States, he marries science fiction and opera to create a founding original myth, without dialogs, filled with desolate infernal landscapes, somewhere between organic and inorganic matter, in which primitive scenes depict the birth of a universe. Thanks to David Wexler’s visual imagination, the brain behind Flying Lotus’ live performances, The Weeknd and the Glitch Mob, and to music by visual artist and composer Gavin Gamboa, Polia et Blastema is a visual hallucination, a pagan ritual, a physical experience, an artistic big bang that blows up in our face.