Ornella Martina Zanoni

What does it mean to know the unknown? What happens when we break with our pre-established way of seeing things? This documentary essay attempts to explore the universe of these unknowns based on our sensory experiences through our encounter with snow, the idea of snow. Its materiality. What it represents in the author's subjectivity, that something she never knew. Taking it apart to understand it. The film works with microscopic images of snowflakes. Those recorded in the 1800s by Wilson Bentley. In turn, it is entirely made up of archival material, especially from other films. The subjectivity that I, as a filmmaker, constructed based on retransmitted and foreign material, is rethought and observed from the same material.

In this documentary essay, the reflections of renowned timeless thinkers are combined with intimate material to explore a particular neurosis about bodily identity framed within a modernity laden with consumerism, overproduction of images, and a growing record of mental disorders. This essay seeks to reflect on the idea of the body as a primary element of identity conception; the fragility of both and their constant mutability.