Mainstream

A reflection on the concept of pain through an immersive flow of images and words.

The Mutability of All Things and the Possibility of Changing Some explores our human adaptability in light of catastrophe by way of seminal literature passages implying a transitory social body.

Set to a breath-like rhythm, Anna Marziano’s Beyond the One is an essayistic exploration of love’s various guises, considering different attempts at courtship, living together, and sustaining connections with people once they have died.

This film is composed of 5 horizons, each one offered by the filmmaker to the voices of some passers by met in Apulia, in June 2013: their words draw closed and open spaces, paths of illnesses and healing.

“Marie-Claude Treilhou (Ateliers Varan) proposed that we make a collective film composed of various shorts that all deal with rage. Even though the project hasn’t yet been completed, right from the start I felt very close to this subject. I’m not talking about the emotional aspect of rage, nor its interpretation in a revolutionary key. Instead, I’m referring to a silent and constitutive rage. Los justos by Jorge Luis Borges was a poem which guided me as I wrote the short, like a serene expression of a radical state of rebellion, composed of the renunciation of power and violence.”

Roubaix, a city with an industrial past, is today one of France’s most destitute areas. During six months of shooting in public places, the filmmaker asked the townspeople to think of one or more things they had been told in the past and that had somehow changed them. Through thirteen sequence shots and microscopic images, she then constructed a sort of cartography of micro-transformations of human trajectories, a poetical study of the dynamism of individuals. In between the extraneousness of the images and the intimate closeness of the voices, the ambiguous space of the singular/plural identity is offered to the experience of the public.

“Farsi seme is silent. Silent like the plants that surround us. Silent like the seeds that I began to collect in places where I would go for a walk. Collecting blood, collecting seeds. The power of seeds represented the intersection of solidarity and singularity: it wasn’t only a no-longer-being-a-flower. There was a multiplicity of forms, a lushness, the intricate delicacy of their forms… I thought of translating venous and menstrual bloods into two different natural pigments, hematite and rubia tinctorum”. (Anna Marziano)

Inspired by the last essay Charles Darwin wrote on the action of worms, Anna Marziano crafted a film where the cultural and political action is placed in continuity with the work of earthworms, digesting and feeding the soil microscopically day after day. The film intertwines direct observation, video projections and the decay of some film negatives buried in the ground in the attempt to keep visual traces of the life of micro-organisms.

A mother and her young daughter live on the island of Sant’Erasmo, Venice. As the waters continue to rise, each responds in her own way to the ecological emergency, to the risks of destruction and disappearance that compel us to care for all living things.