The Last Faust
2019 film directed by Philipp Humm

The Last Faust is a 2019 feature art film written and directed by the German artist Philipp Humm. Set in 2059, it is a contemporary interpretation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1808 Faust and the first film directly based on both parts of the tragedy. It stars English actors Steven Berkoff (Dr. Goodfellow) and, Martin Hancock (Faust). Its music is based on Richard Wagner with tracks from Swiss electronic music duo Yello.
The film is part of a bigger project with the same name - The Last Faust, it is Humm's Gesamtkunstwerk (total works of art) and "entails more than 150 artworks including a feature artfilm, an illustrated novella and collections of drawings, sculptures, fine art photographs and paintings."
Plot
It is 2059 and Tech CEO Dr. Goodfellow is hiding in the townhouse of his late mother. The house is safe as it is not connected to the AI-neural network, a creation of Goodfellow, which is now on the verge of eliminating the human race. Goodfellow is accompanied by his latest creation, an advanced android, Paris, to whom Goodfellow tells the story of his predecessor, Faust.
The story begins with God and Devil (Mephisto) making a bet, over a game of chess.
The public source identifies “The Last Faust” as 2019 film directed by Philipp Humm. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Last, Faust and film.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83987738. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2059 and 1808.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Last Faust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.