A once forgotten vérité masterwork, William Greaves’ daring countercultural cinematic experiment turns filmmaking upside down and inside out – the original film crew shooting a film crew head trip. In New York’s Central Park, two actors, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, perform a romantic breakup scene over and over at the behest of their director William Greaves (the actual director of this film). As one film crew records the ordeal, a second documentary crew films them filming – Greaves himself even has a camera. As Greaves tests the patience of his cast, strangers wander in and out and a chaotic diorama of performance and power dynamics emerges – all to a killer Miles Davis score.

A film as thrilling to watch as it is to recite the title of (that is to say, very), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is a hugely innovative and influential work of self-reflexive avante-garde cinema by black actor, civil rights activist, filmmaker and television show-runner William Greaves who here sets up a recipe for chaos then stirs the pot to challenge the way we think about film, performance, documentary and truth from so many different angles and viewpoints. After touring some festivals, no one was brave enough to distribute it until it was rediscovered twenty-four years later at Sundance by the likes of Steve Buscemi and Steven Soderbergh who then helped Greaves to make a sequel Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½ in 2003.