Longest Film Ever Made Gets a 72-Minute Teaser

A movie that lasts a month? That’s what Swedish artist Anders Weberg hopes to accomplish with Ambiancé, a 720-hour experimental film that will attempt to set the record for the longest movie ever made. In anticipation of its 2020 release, Weberg has posted the first “short teaser” for Ambiancé, which clocks in at a mere 72 minutes. (Hat tip to Reddit for the heads up.) The trailer is a dream-like series of moving images, with variations in color, light, and film speed, all set to the music of German electronica artist Marsen Jules. It’s a pleasant viewing experience, if not an eventful one, but you might want to watch it now: He’s pulling it from the Internet on 20 July.

This teaser is only the beginning. According to the timeline on Weberg’s website, thelongestfilm.com, he’ll release the first “short trailer” in 2016. That one will be 7 hours and 20 minutes long, to be followed by a 72-hour trailer in 2018. Finally, the full thirty-day film Ambiancé will be “shown in its full length on a single occasion synchronized in all the continents of the world and then destroyed.” So book those Antarctica tickets today!

For now, the longest-film record is held by Modern Times Forever, a ten-day-long Danish art film from 2011 that chronicles the deterioration of a building in Helsinki. In terms of Hollywood movies, the longest English-language film to play in theaters is probably Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which opened in limited release in 1996 at a length of 242 minutes (or just over 4 hours). The only recent film to come close is The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, a blockbuster despite its 201-minute run time.