Ilaria Di Carlo

A bear is hunted and caged. But he escapes again and again. He is loved as much as he is feared. A hybrid of wilderness and projection. The film PAPILLON follows his trail. And also becomes a hybrid. Of documentary and myth.

Polyphem is the second chapter in a series of short experimental landscape films that reinterpret the stages of the journey of Homer‘s Odyssey and set them in the context of the anthropocene. Filmed in the only active bauxite tailings pond in Germany, Polyphem reimagines the myth of Polyphemus from Homer’s Odyssey within a contemporary landscape scarred by red mud, industrial aluminium waste.

Monolithic power plants; billowing columns of smoke; the backdrop of a red sun. Sirens is an experimental short documentary that captures Germany’s coal-fired power plants in their final years of generating energy. Shot entirely from helicopters, the film takes us on a journey through industrial wastelands, thus recalling the passage of Ulysses’ boat through the Sirens’ strait. An odyssey through the dystopian industrial world that has left a permanent mark on earth’s ecosphere.

When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.

Loosely based on Dante's Divine Comedy, The Divine Way takes us along on the protagonist's epic descent through an endless labyrinth of staircases. As the woman journeys deeper, the staircases mutate, and she is trapped and pulled into their dangerous landscape, conducting us through more than 50 magnificent locations.