The People and The Whale

A stop motion animated film about a group of lost bodies who wander through a forest and convene without a specified purpose in an open field.

Peter Larsson’s Keyhole Conversation draws the eye down to the small gate of the camera. From there, through quivering and percussive forms of direct and stop-motion animation, the eye begins to experience the scale of an image anew. At times segueing into a flicker, but maintaining a charmed form of attention to the marks of pencils and the channels dredged in emulsion by a paintbrush, all to a curious soundtrack of pulses and bleeps.

A girl looks out over a snow-covered garden where everything seems to lie eeriely still. Further into the house lies her sick mother in her bed. When a strange being shows up outside the window, the borders between dream and reality, life and death, cease in this experimental horror poem.

The year was 1916, we follow Sire’s everyday life, until her final moments. We are a part of her little world and get to see how big that little world can be. How rich it’s in emotions, sounds and memories. Sire reminds us of life, not death. She was my Máttaráhkku, great-grandmother, and my grandfather was 10.

A man that no one knows is walking in the park without getting anywhere. When the winter arrives and he dies the local government arranges a big fair in the park. The people are happy and buy things.

People have gathered in a field to attend a ceremony. They are all wearing different costumes and masks. The purpose of the ceremony remains unclear and the gathering soon turns into a dissolved state.

A fragmented story of the forest as the bearer of emotions, life and dark mysticism. In short scenes, we are sucked into environments that, through the camera’s slow crawl and the intense presence of the sound, give us a sense of narrative. Something is threatening, but the story is broken. This is a disoriented horror movie or the unsorted memories from a traumatized camera.