Carlos Casas

A Javanese fisherman experiences the greatest volcanic eruption of all time. Stranded on a deserted island, in search of food and water, he draws closer to the depths of the earth. A visceral and psychedelic odyssey.

According to the 12th century mystic Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, the world we live in is only one of the 18,000 that make up the universe. The film 18,000 WORLDS is conceived as a video story that draws attention to a world that is losing contact with its ancestors, and where the danger of losing forms of knowledge is real.

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra, his mahout, are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. The group of poachers following them will die one after the other under mysterious circumstances and spells.

A double-screen film captured on location along the coast of the Bering Strait in the Chukotka region of Northeastern Siberia-- At once, a look into the lives of a band of reindeer herders and a stunning, ambient portrait of the tundra.

A visual sound work with live soundtrack in a 6 channel stereophonic sound.

Composed of footage from Central Asian film archives, Swan Lake addresses the period running from a decade before to a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film includes familiar visual markers of the era: long queues outside shops, popular television programs hosted by healers and hypnotists, ballerinas performing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1876). This was a typical television intermezzo in the late Soviet empire, when high culture often filled the airwaves during moments of political uncertainty, whether the death of another elderly leader or an emergency declared in Moscow. What may be less familiar to Western audiences is the footage drawn from Central Asian films of the same period. These fragments extend the usual visual aesthetics of perestroika into a different regional context, introducing other ethnicities, landscapes, and urban spaces into what is often remembered as a predominantly Russian narrative of late-Soviet culture.

A man lives alone inside a closed labyrinth like space which seems to reflect his state of mind. The windows open into his subconscious to illuminate the desolate and mysterious spectacle of his solitude as if this were the last day of the world, and he the last man able to testify.

Film part of Siberian Fieldworks.