by FIlmInk Staff
Artist, filmmaker, and writer Philipp Humm will release his English-language feature film The Last Faust starring Steven Berkoff free worldwide on YouTube tonight, 23 June 2026 at 7.30pm BST, followed by a German dubbed version featuring the voice of Volker Lechtenbrink and a freely accessible illustrated digital edition released across major e-book and online platforms.
Originally created in 2018–2019, The Last Faust was among the first cinematic reinterpretations of Goethe’s Faust I & II to transpose the myth into the age of artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley.
Set in the year 2059, the project imagines a world in which humanity is gradually displaced by a superior neural-network intelligence emerging from a modern Faustian pact.
Created before the rise of generative AI, the project anticipated themes now central to contemporary debates surrounding artificial intelligence: optimisation without limits, the erosion of human agency, and the transfer of decision-making from human beings to increasingly autonomous systems.
The feature film stars Steven Berkoff as Dr Goodfellow, the successor to Faust and CEO of the world’s most powerful technology company. The project formed part of Humm’s larger Gesamtkunstwerk The Last Faust, which combined cinema, painting, photography, sculpture, and literature into a contemporary reinterpretation of Goethe’s masterpiece.
The re-release accompanies a renewed public discussion around the meaning of Faust in the age of artificial intelligence. In recent essays, including “The Faustian Pact After Intelligence,” and a forthcoming June publication in Lettre International, Humm argues that Faust remains the defining myth of modern technological civilization: a civilization driven by endless optimisation, acceleration, and the refusal of limits.
“Faust is no longer simply a literary figure,” Humm says. “He has become the operating logic of modern technological society. What Goethe understood as an individual tragedy has become a planetary system.”
The decision to make the project freely accessible reflects Humm’s desire to democratise Faust for a wider audience and reintroduce Goethe’s work through contemporary visual culture. Alongside the feature film, Humm will release illustrated digital editions and online visual materials designed to bring Faust to new audiences through cinematic and visual storytelling.
“Too often Faust is treated as something distant, academic, or culturally inaccessible,” Humm says. “I wanted to bring Goethe back into public life and show that Faust is not about the past. It is about the world we are now entering.”
The Last Faust premieres here at 7.30pm BST
