In Between Art Film

Pierre Bismuth hires a private detective and a duo of screenwriters to investigate on an enigmatic artwork.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, a film crew is shooting an adaptation of Camus' La Peste. Reality and fiction start to blur between each other.

A small film crew is wandering about Marrakesh and the surrounding desert. They are looking for locations for the remake of an American film in which a man swims his way home, passing through the houses and pools that he finds along the route. Corrado is the stand in used to test the shots, locations and the swimming pools in which the lead will be filmed. While we watch his attempts to get into the part, the real actors and a real crew burst onto the scene, on a set in which no one is in the right place. A film with a crisis of identity, in a surreal search for itself.

The aphotic zone is the deep and dark region encompassing most oceanic waters, into which light hardly penetrates. The Lithuanian artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė has made a hypnotic film, somewhere between documentary and imaginary account, in which the oddness of the underwater world is confronted with the sonic landscape of a distant civilisation.

Every day of her life, Angela kept a diary, filled with words and drawings, in which she recorded public and private matters, meetings, things she had read, everything. Including the account of two trips to Russia (1989-90). The period of the collapse of the USSR. A diary that she had been keeping in small Chinese notebooks, since before Dal Polo all’Equatore (1986), on our uninterrupted work on the violence of the 20th century. From our tours in the United States with the “scented films” of the late seventies to the Anthology Film Archive of New York and the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive...

Lacerate blends elements of realism with a dreamlike, symbolic dimension, portraying the extreme decision of a woman who turns from victim into executioner. In a series of mises-en-scène shot only in natural light, we see a domestic setting overrun by a pack of dogs that roam around restlessly, attacking objects and furniture. The interior of this home is a mental space, violated and lacerated like a body that has undergone violence. Fruit, game, and remnants of food are arranged like still lifes, with allegorical elements evoking the precariousness of life and the loss of innocence.

The work is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (“The Veiled One”), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in eighth-century southern Central Asia, while it speculates about the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. Al-Muqannaʿ preached an ideological syncretism of Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism and Buddhism, and awakened the minds of his “White-Clothed” disciples by shedding light on the status quo of his time, challenging practices of land exploitation, authoritarian centralized power, and religious repression. His legacy, which might be seen today as “proto socialist,” was appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of how to rise up and fight for the communal sharing of property and wealth.

Around the sleeping bodies, some presences occupy the architecture and move around the space in obscure activities: nothing of their actions is visible to us, except in the fragments in which the image shows itself under the flashlight. Monelle is a circular film without any narrative or hierarchy, without a beginning or an end, and it circumscribes a place of promiscuity and ambiguity between the different formats used—35mm and CGI animation—and the approaches of two opposites film attitudes—the structural cinema and the horror genre.

I felt an urgent need to continue with I diari di Angela - Noi due cineasti. Capitolo secondo, for me a world of symbols and colors. Our long journey together could only be given new meaning again. I set out, with considerable reserve, to make the second part of the film that in 2018 had had a favorable reception all over the world. I thought for a long time about how to make use again of her words, her drawings and her silences. Angela and I filmed and wrote two parallel diaries. The images I shot around Europe, America and elsewhere fit perfectly with her writings.

A group of women perform small actions following the artist's instructions that can become a simulation of a violent act. The film is part of the program Mascarilla 19 commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film.