Immortality or Bust Trailer Politicizes Neolution

The many clones Tatiana Maslany played on Orphan Black banded together to fight Neolution, and this was when it mainly was a belief for people who’d undergone technological enhancements, like tails. The Immortality or Bust trailer follows the man who invented volcano surfing as he rides a transhuman wave to Washington.

On The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Major’s astronaut Steve Austin was rebuilt into the world’s first bionic man. Government scientists made him “better, stronger and faster” through biotechnical enhancements. The man at the center of Immortality or Bust wants to take that one step further. “Do you want to live forever and become a cyborg,” asks the official website. “In the last Presidential election, one man embarked on an impossible expedition to defeat aging and forever change the human being through science. Running for President as the Transhumanist Party nominee, Zoltan Istvan took his message to bio hacking labs, cryopreservation facilities, transhumanist churches, and ultimately, Washington DC.”

You can watch the trailer here:

The 77-minute feature documentary, which won the Breakout Award at the 2019 Raw Science Film Festival, follows Zoltan on the campaign trail. Director Daniel Sollinger, along with embedded journalist Dylan Matthews of Vox, got on The Immortality Bus, a 38-foot coffin-shaped bus The New York Times Magazine called “the great brown sarcophagus of the American highway…a metaphor of life itself,” to cover the future of politics. Transhumanism’s primary goal is to overcome biological death with science and technology. The bus itself is one the most recognized activist projects in the transhumanist movement. During Istvan’s 2016 US Presidential campaign, it picked up over 100 million views.

“Zoltan’s obsessions are weird, but so was Al Gore’s fascination with climate change in the 80s,” Matthews wrote in an 11,000 word feature about the bus, according to a press statement, where he called Zoltan “some modern-day Ken Kesey.”

Filmed over three years, Immortality or Bust highlights Zoltan’s personal take on futurist politics and science activism. It also explores the transhumanist community. The documentary also shows Zoltan’s father, Steven Gyurko, who died soon after he voted for his son for president. The documentary includes exclusive personal footage of the body and Zoltan’s last words to his father. The film also delves into the libertarian politician’s marriage and family life in San Francisco. His wife is a medical doctor, and she brings sobering skepticism to the film.

The documentary interviews science figures and journalists like Libertarian Gary Johnson, cryptocurrency expert John McAfee, futurist Jacque Fresco, and comedian Jimmy Dore. Some are not supportive of the political movement, like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Immortality or Bust also includes Zoltan’s interview with Anonymous. He is the only known presidential candidate to be questioned by the underground collective.

Immortality or Bust will be available on Cable on Demand starting June 23.