The Netherlands 2025, 55 min, HDA DOXY Films Production
by Marc Schmidt
The Ten Commandments: How to Disappear Completely
In an attempt to make sense of his late father's excessive insatiability, filmmaker Marc Schmidt embarks on a personal search for the emptiness within us with four women, oscillating between loss, sex addiction, bulimia, and sailing.The film explores the feeling of emptiness and how we try to escape it: a young mother tries to subdue emptiness with daily binge eating. A sex addict chases her ‘shot’, searching for the man who will be able to heal her. The ultimate confrontation with emptiness is faced by a sailor who crosses the Atlantic all alone. Revealing archive footage shows her facing her deepest despair and fears amidst an endless sea. Between the portraits, it slowly becomes clear that Marc too, like his father, knows the emptiness that lies behind excess.
What does this emptiness entail, where does it come from and why is it unbearable? Underneath the addictions and obsessions of the individuals in the film, existential struggles appear to lie. Sometimes these stem from concrete, disruptive events such as incest or repressed war memories. But also constantly present in the background of the film is the empty excess of our consumer society.
The portraits of the insatiable are freely interwoven. Observations, staged scenes and interviews are interspersed with shots that Marc took of his father in his studio shortly before his death. We see him working stubbornly silent on dark etchings, sometimes casting an anxious glance into the camera. The etchings themselves play a prominent role in the film. Slowly, the film skims over the lines of ink in extreme close-ups. In a posthumous letter to his father, Marc recounts his memories of pain and emptiness; also within himself.
Moving along topical themes - deepfake, eating disorders, addiction, identity and intergenerational trauma - this film is a hyper-personal portrayal of a widely held sentiment in Western societies.
HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY is part of a documentary series on the Ten Commandments, produced by DOXY Films and EOdocs, in which ten filmmakers each give their take on one of the Commandments. Marc Schmidt ventured into the first commandment: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’
The Ten Commandments - Complete Series