In an Imagined Garden

An experimental film: dozens of pictorial techniques applied directly on celluloid; a work of impressive aesthetics that recovers certain ideas of abstract expressionism: endless chromaticism, constant mutations, the music of the cosmos, mysticism, synesthesia… and an enigmatic title that, although it imitates the phonetics of the Basque language, means nothing.

Sistiaga painted directly on 70mm film a circular (planetary?) form, around which dance shifting colours in a psychedelic acceleration matched by the soundtrack’s deep-space roar and howl. - Cinema Scope

Documentary about the history of experimental cinema in Spain. FRAGMENTS is a historical survey of “the other” Spanish Cinema — films that brazenly explored their artistic, poetic and conceptual potential. Spanish experimental cinema can be glimpsed in a series of important yet isolated events that FRAGMENTS compiles through various firsthand accounts, film excerpts and documents. For the first time in Spain, a documentary brings together the most relevant of a cinema that is slowly losing its invisibility.

A dynamic visual journey through the films of José Antonio Sistiaga, for his paintings, of fruitful and relevant experience, for his erotic work, and their personal experiences and more endearing.

Abstract sequences alternate between shadowy landscapes and nocturnal visuals, evoking unsettling atmospheres rather than a traditional narrative.

In the tradition of the painters of the Romantic movement, Sistiaga became interested in the question of transparency in painting, particularly starting with the painted film experiment ERE ERERA BALEIBU… The film evokes atomic matter imagined in full light; in 2022, following a 4K restoration of this film, the artist proposed an inverted version, as he had done at the beginning of the 1990s for his two films EN UN JARDÍN IMAGINADO and PAISAJE INQUITANTE-NOCTURNO. After all, is it light or dark between the atoms? A misguided question of an earthling!

Han closes a trilogy that began with Ere erera baleibu... (1968) and continued with Impressions en haute atmosphère (1991), which goes from the microcosm of atoms (Ere Erera) to the macrocosm of cosmic galaxies. After an "informal" abstraction obtained through the projection of fine particles on a transparent film tape from which all notion of form is shunned, the artist reintroduced in his following movies simple shapes, circles and spirals, coils, reproduced according to the most traditional technique of movement decomposition (animation cinema), which "channels" Brownian motion of matter.

One day, the artist was waiting for a girlfriend named Ana, who notified him at the last moment that she could not come because she was leaving for Germany for work. To film himself in this moment of disappointment and despair was the artist's way of immediately getting back to work. Some would have written in their diary; Sistiaga made a self-portrait film of the artist in a saturnine mood: a reference to the famous lithograph by Dürer, Melencolia, in which the window evokes the universe of painting.