On The Good Earth

Several animals chat via text messages. Between mundane exchanges of words, rivalries emerge. Have they become human?

All attempts by a gang to carry out major thefts fail, so its members resort to kidnapping children belonging to wealthy families. Hoping to get a lot of money via ransomware.

Egyptian artist Basim Magdy crafts an immersive, hallucinatory audio-visual dreamscape reminiscing on the absurdity of death without trying to understand it. His associative universe of sounds and signifiers imagines a present moment suspended between traces of the mythic past and spectres of uncertain futures. Harnessing the live, organic qualities of super 16mm, the film builds a singular, dissonant energy that stalks the outer boundaries of science fiction, horror, and nature documentary.

A double slide projection illustrates the necessary destruction that takes place on sites of construction. Using teargas remedies used by revolutionaries in the Middle East, the photographic processing smears the slides in a mixture of hues to depict a familiar site in an otherworldly place.

Layered and manually altered 16mm footage intertwines with the soundtrack and the narrative, presented through subtitles, to tell the story of a man who moves away from the sea to escape death by water. He soon finds himself alone when his co-workers go to the beach and never return. Society becomes a stranger and his imagination becomes his only friend. He dials a random number and a romantic conversation about loneliness and the absurdity of reality ensues. His world starts acquiring meaning as he realizes part-time-singer monkeys are running the show.

In Basim Magdy's imagined future, the increasing force of gravity has significantly changed life on earth, making it nearly uninhabitable for humans. Markings on the underside of standing stones allude to past catastrophes. Past, present and future merge in this poetic rumination on the impact of an irreversibly changed Earth.

The devil throws up waterfalls as monuments stand witness to a war being overshadowed by its successor. The water flows through ancient valleys as birds with stolen feet and borrowed beaks stare at nothing in particular. Only stone, bronze and the sky manage to outlive the fading memories. Faces, gestures and final words mumbled before departure camouflage themselves to blend in with the changing colors of the sky. Loss becomes a tradition for the forgetful and our shadows become slow death in a world of kaleidoscopic confusion.

The film No Shooting Stars by Basim Magdy is built around the personal narrative of an unidentified inhabitant of the ocean space, a territory that lays dormant on the margins of our awareness and does not enter history books. Dream-like scenes drift in dissonance with a narration that has no beginning or end. It unfolds like a poem that is affected by the ocean’s secrets but offers no explanation about who is living under the water’s surface, instead meandering through loops of imagination. The image of who exactly the narrator is slips away as soon as it takes shape, reflecting the logic of the unstable grounds of water space.

Super 8 film transferred to HD video