Palimpsest

An unseen location scout explores an opal-mining town in South Australia in this sci-fi-laced essay film, which finds in this semideserted region both the traces of indigenous culture and remnants of cinema history

Three characters, three perspectives, three directors. A session between a psychiatric, a schizophrenic patient and his mother.

During the 1980s, claims of satanic ritual abuse ran rife throughout the western world, uncovered by hypnotic therapists and perpetuated throughout the media, including high-rating television talk shows. In Demonic, filmmaker Pia Borg delves into this bizarre chapter of history, examining the elusive line between fact, fiction and the persuasive power of the media.

Crystal World is inspired by J.G Ballard’s apocalyptic science fiction novel of the same name where a viral crystal metamorphoses trees, animals, humans and architecture into frozen jewels forever suspended in time and space. The novel is a haunting portrait of a world in which everything is illuminated by prismatic light, a ‘leaking’ of time that causes humans to experience individual moments endlessly looped, repeated and prolonged. My film adapts this concept of crystallization and applies it to fragments from the 1955 film. I reconstruct scenes from Charles Laughton’s iconic film with underwater puppets, which I then crystallize using ammonium phosphate crystals, time-lapse photography, mirrors, prisms, and projectors. (http://piaborg.com)